Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Edited by Jack Jacobs Foreword by Feliks Tych

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Edited by

Jack Jacobs Professor of Government John Jay College The City University of New York

Foreword by Feliks Tych Director Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw

in association with

the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw

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Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 5 © Jack Jacobs 2001 Foreword © Feliks Tych 2001 Chapters 1–4, 6–19 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–75462–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Mikhl

Contents

Frontispiece: Bundist meeting in Warsaw, 1930s Acknowledgments Preface Foreword by Feliks Tych List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors

PART I

x xi xv xxi xxii

IN THE YEARS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

1

Khevres and Akhdes: the Change in Jewish Self-organization in the Kingdom of Poland before 1900 and the Bund François Guesnet

2

The Bundist Press: a Study of Political Change and the Persistence of Anachronistic Language during the Russian Period Susanne Marten-Finnis

13

3

The Influence of the ‘Polish Question’ on the Bund’s National Program, 1897–1905 Joshua D. Zimmerman

28

4

Russian Bundists Abroad and in Exile, 1898–1925 Claudie Weill

46

PART II

3

THE BUND IN POLAND BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

5

Creating a Bundist Counter-Culture: Morgnshtern and the Significance of Cultural Hegemony Jack Jacobs

59

6

Kossovsky, Portnoy, and Others: the Role of Members of the Bund’s Founding Generation in the Interwar Polish Bund Gertrud Pickhan

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7

The Bund: History of a Schism Abraham Brumberg

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Contents

8

The Bund Organization in Lodz, 1898–1939 Pawe´l Samus´

9

The Bund’s Contribution to Yiddish Culture in Poland between the Two World Wars Nathan Cohen

PART III

90 112

OTHER SOCIALISTS AND THE BUND

10 The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and the Bund Rick Kuhn

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11 From Conflict to Cooperation: the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party, 1897–1939 Piotr Wróbel

155

12 Austro-Marxism and the Jews in Galicia John Bunzl

172

13 German Social Democrats and Polish Bundists in Exile in London, 1939–45: Memories Susanne Miller

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14 The Bund and the Labour and Socialist International Mario Kessler

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PART IV

THE HOLOCAUST AND POST-HOLOCAUST YEARS

15 The National Ideology of the Bund in the Test of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, 1933–47 Daniel Blatman

197

16 The Bund after the Holocaust: Between Renewal and Self-Liquidation David Engel

213

17 Where was there a Future for Polish Jewry? Bundist and Zionist Polemics in Post-World War II Poland Natalia Aleksiun

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18 Between New York and Moscow: the Fate of the Bund Archives Marek Web

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Contents

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19 The Concept of National Cultural Autonomy: the First One Hundred Years Yoav Peled

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Index

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Acknowledgments Publication of this work was made possible by grants from the Forward Association and from the Arthur Zygielbaum Memorial Fund of the Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Labor Bund. I am extremely grateful for their support. J.J. New York

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Preface History, generally speaking, is written by – or about – victors. The year 1997, for example, was widely perceived by Jewish historians around the world as being notable first and foremost as the 100th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, which is now seen as a pivotal moment in the movement leading towards the creation of a Jewish state. The General Jewish Workers’ Bund, on the other hand, which was founded in Vilna in 1897, and which, therefore, also commemorated its 100th anniversary in 1997, has received far less attention from contemporary academics – despite the fact that the Bund was the first modern Jewish political party in the Russian Empire, and was, arguably, the strongest Jewish party in Poland on the eve of the Second World War.

Though it was founded illegally, and operated under the most adverse of conditions, the Bund grew dramatically in the years immediately after its creation in Czarist Russia. It helped to organize the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP), it organized armed selfdefense groups to fight against pogroms, and it played a significant role in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Indeed, during these early years, the Bundist became for many the symbol of the new Jew – enlightened, unwilling to accept the status quo of Jewish communities dominated by the orthodox and the wealthy, and of a Russia oppressed by the Czar, and willing to fight for Jewish rights and needs. At the time of its creation, while insisting that Jews must be granted equal civil rights, the Bund did not endorse any national demands for Russian Jewry per se. It underwent a metamorphosis during the first few years of the twentieth century, however, and ultimately carved out a position quite distinctive on the Jewish street by committing itself, at one and the same time, to a program of national cultural autonomy for Russian Jewry, to Marxism, and to the perspective that Zionism was a reactionary ideology which diverted Jewish workers from the key task confronting them – the overthrow of the Czar and the creation of a socialist society in Russia itself. The Bund rejected Lenin’s organizational outlook and his stance toward the national question from a rather early date onward. While the Bund demanded both that the RSDRP allow the Bund to function xi

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throughout Russia and that the Bund be recognized as the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, Lenin favored a highly centralized party structure, and rejected both of the Bund’s demands out of hand. As a result of a voting system which granted an equal weight to the vote of every group represented at RSDRP congresses regardless of size, the Bund lost on both of these issues in 1903, and thereby presaged the loss it would ultimately suffer in Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Bundists such as Mark Liber, Raphael Abramovich, and Henryk Erlich played leading roles in Russian political affairs in the period immediately following the overthrow of the Czar in February of that year. But, like social democratic parties around the world, the Bund ultimately split over the question of its relationship to Bolshevism. At the 12th conference of the Bund, which assembled in Moscow in April of 1920, a majority of the delegates voted in favor of a resolution endorsing the positions of the All-Russian Communist Party. In the wake of this vote, a minority faction, committed to a socialist vision which was both democratic and revolutionary, and having lost on this make-or-break issue, stormed out of the conference and formed its own organization, the Social Democratic Bund. By 1922, however, the Social Democratic Bund had been declared illegal and those who had been affiliated with it were subjected to persecution. Mark Liber, among others, was eventually executed by the Soviet government. Other Russian Bundists who had joined the Social Democratic Bund succeeded in fleeing abroad or withdrew from political activity. In the newly independent state of Poland, however, the Bund flowered. It had enormous influence, between the two world wars, within the Polish Jewish trade union movement. The Polish Bund helped to establish a network of secular Jewish day schools, which distinguished itself by its use of progressive pedagogical techniques, and in which Yiddish was the language of instruction. In 1926, it created a famous sanatorium for children – the Medem Sanatorium – which was named after the Bundist writer Vladimir Medem, and which continued to operate until after the beginning of the Second World War. The Bund in Poland also fostered an organization for youngsters, a movement for working-class teenagers and young adults, and additional organizations for athletes and for women. There were, between the wars, Bundist workers’ clubs, libraries, and cultural centers. Thousands of Jewish workers took courses, attended lectures, or participated in choirs and other cultural activities organized under Bundist auspices. Indeed, it may well be that the

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Bund scored its greatest successes, and had its greatest impact, precisely in the cultural, social, and pedagogical fields. Though the Bund published numerous newspapers and periodicals in both Yiddish and Polish during the interwar period, it clearly emphasized the former. The Bund’s advocacy of Yiddish – which it referred to as ‘the cultured language of a cultured people’ – distinguished it not only from Polonized assimilationists, but also from those parts of the Zionist movement which believed that only Hebrew was suitable to serve as a national language of the Jewish people. During this period, the Bund represented an alternative, quite popular, voice in the Jewish community. When, in 1936, the Bund called on Jewish workers to participate in a half-day general strike, the Bund’s call struck a responsive chord within the Jewish population. On March 17, 1936, Jewish areas of all major Polish cities were shut tight. Additional evidence of the popularity of the Bund on the eve of the Second World War may be obtained by examining electoral results. The Bund did not do well electorally in the first decade and a half of Polish independence. By the late 1930s, however, Bundist candidates were regularly winning massive victories in Polish municipal elections and in Jewish communal elections. In Warsaw, for example, Poland’s largest city and the city with the largest Jewish population, the Bund won 16 of the 20 Jewish seats in the last pre-War municipal elections. In Lodz, the Bund won 11 out of 17 seats. It achieved comparable victories in Bialystok, Grodno, Vilna, and elsewhere. And then came a two-sided catastrophe of overwhelming proportions – the invasion of western Poland by the Nazis, and the invasion of eastern Poland by the USSR. A handful of Bundists ultimately succeeded in escaping this death trap. With the aid and support of the New York-based Jewish Labor Committee, a small number of Bundist leaders were granted American visas, and survived the Second World War in New York or elsewhere. Certain others, who fell into the hands of the Soviet secret police, including the two most prominent leaders of the Polish Bund, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, either committed suicide or were killed while being held prisoner by the Stalinist regime. As did members of certain other Jewish parties, both of the Left and of the Right, members of organizations affiliated with the Bund contributed substantially to the armed resistance in Nazioccupied Poland. The traditions of the Bundist self-defense groups in Czarist Russia and in inter-War Poland definitely prepared Bundist youth to engage in armed resistance to the Nazis in ways that some other sectors of the Jewish community – such as the orthodox

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sector – simply were not. Virtually all of the members of the Bund, however, both those who fought with arms and those who didn’t, ultimately suffered the fate of Polish Jewry as a whole, and were exterminated, or died, in ghettos or camps. Like European Jewry, the Bund has never recovered. To be sure, surviving Bundists, proud of their traditions, created Bundist organizations in the postwar years in many of the lands of the Jewish diaspora. Organizationally, however, the Bund per se is now made up in large part of women and men of the older generation.

The academic conference organized under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in November of 1997 – at which the contributions to this volume were first delivered – analyzed and debated topics related to the history of the Bund and its ideology from a broad range of perspectives. Participants in the conference included historians, political scientists and linguists, Jews and non-Jews, socialists and non-socialists, individuals sympathetic to the Bundist perspective and those who were critical of its ideology, scholars specializing in Jewish history, and others specializing in such fields as East European history, the history of socialism, and the history of ideas. These views are all represented here. Indeed, it is my hope that this volume will contribute to debates as to the nature and significance of the Bund precisely by underscoring that the Bund was a major, multi-faceted phenomenon, which deserves to be examined from a number of vantage points. My thanks to all those who organized the Warsaw conference, to all those who participated in it, to those who provided material support for the conference or for this publication, and, above all, to the contributors, for their help and cooperation.

Foreword Feliks Tych If one were to say briefly what it was in the political concept of the Bund that had the greatest impact on its historical role in Czarist Russia and in independent Poland, then one would most probably point out that it was the adoption of the premise that the future of the majority of Jews was tied to that of the territories in which they lived. It is a cruel historical paradox that this assumption, logical as it was, was later put to the test during the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people. At the time that the Bund first put forth this assumption, however, no one could have foreseen that later development. A major phase of the Bund’s activity in Poland – by which I mean the initial four decades of its operation – took place at a time when, for a multitude of reasons that we know about today, the idea of creating a national seat in the Land of Israel could be carried into effect only by an avant-garde movement of pioneers. However, such a solution to the problems confronting Jewry could not be adopted by millions of Polish or Russian Jews. The majority of Polish Jews did not have sufficient resources to make emigration a viable option for them. A major part of the Jewish population resident in Central and Eastern Europe – particularly after immigration limits had been imposed by the United States, Canada, South Africa and other countries in the 1920s, and in view of the very small absorptive capacity of Palestine, both for political and economic reasons – was doomed to remain where it was. It is in this objective context that one should perceive not only the Bund’s activity and program, but also its role in the promotion of modern national awareness and of the political emancipation of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe. One may even venture to say that while all other Jewish parties and political orientations were no more than self-defense movements, the Bund’s program and the Zionist project were the only creative programs to further the Jewish cause. Despite the dramatic disputes between the Bund and the Zionists, the rhetoric of which was exceptionally sharp, these movements agreed that the Jews were to be viewed not merely as a religious or ethnic group, but as a people that deserved a place for itself among other modern societies. The differences between these movements began when it was necessary to propose political paths towards the maintenance and development of Jewish national identity and to xv

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propose visions for society (although, as is well known, within Zionism itself there were also orientations to which social democratic solutions were by no means alien). The main demarcation line between Bundists and Zionists was drawn by a dispute as to where Jewish national aspirations should find their fulfillment. Should they be realized in the societies where the Jews lived or in the Land of Israel? The choice of one or the other of those options was organically related to attitudes towards the political and social modernization of those states in which the Jews lived. The Bund’s choice also entailed choosing social democracy, including certain elements of social utopia, which were integral to it. When we say that the Bund’s program, regardless of the utopian element in it, promoted a struggle for decent living conditions for Jewry as a nation in the countries in which it resided, and that the Bund promoted a struggle for the maintenance and development of the Jewish national substance on equal terms with the national environment by which they were surrounded, we need to remember that this program was based on a key assumption: that the society of which the Jews were a part and the state governing that society were in need of a profound democratization. This entailed an on-going search for allies. The latter strategic premise was also what accounted for the modern nature of the Bund’s political doctrine. The party did not propose to enclose Jews within a national identity, but instead adopted a more rational approach. It offered a solution to the problems confronting Jewry in a broader context, intended to ensure both co-existence on decent terms and guarantees for cultural differences. The search for allies who could help to attain those goals, however, paradoxically turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of the Bund throughout the entire span of the party’s operation. This was due not so much to the Bund itself, but to its potential and sometimes formal allies. The Bund was isolated both in the Polish and in the Jewish political arena over a major part of its existence in spite of the fact that it did its utmost to bring about the opposite. This isolation was not broken in spite of the Bund’s early association with, and even involvement in the establishment of, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP), which, in principle, was to unite the social democratic movement of the entire Empire and which was joined in 1906 by the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the party of Rosa Luxemburg. Both Lenin and Luxemburg accused the Bund of separatist tendencies and of undermining the unity of the workers’ movement in the Russian state.

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In reality those accusations were a cover-up of the aspirations of both the SDKPiL and the Bolsheviks, which wanted to influence the Jewish masses without, however, recognizing Jewry as a modern and separate nation. Both the RSDRP and the SDKPiL promoted assimilation: Jewry was to dissolve completely among the nations that made up the majority of the population in those countries in which the bulk of the Jews lived. Thus, the Bund’s staking its hopes on an alliance with the Russian Social Democrats ended in fiasco. The October Revolution, and the liquidation of the Bund in Soviet Russia that followed in its aftermath, merely confirmed that the alliance was a total failure. Nevertheless, the Bund, as if turning a blind eye on this fact, tried initially to become a member of the Communist International (Comintern), which was dominated by the Bolsheviks. In Poland, moreover, the Bund’s isolation became even more pronounced in the 1920s than it had been in the period preceding 1918, when it had tried to form a political bloc with the Polish Socialist Party-Left (PPS-Left), and even with the SDKPiL. Outside Poland, alliances between Bundists and Mensheviks were slightly more long-lived, although their impact on the Bund’s everyday operation was next to null. The Bund’s continued isolation in the 1920s may be partly attributed to its internal problems with polarizing tendencies, as evidenced by the three-year-long episode of the Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund (Kombund), and by disputes over the Bund’s association with the Comintern. Equally important was the reluctance demonstrated by the parties of the Left in independent Poland to enter alliances with the Bund. The Communists in Poland were in no way inclined to establish authentic alliances on equal terms with other Left parties, and continued to cherish sectarian attitudes in spite of their declared ‘opening’ in 1923. The Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which had a national liberation program, could hardly forgive the Bund its very reticent attitude towards the reestablishment of the Polish state before 1918, and its initial failure to affirm the reborn Polish state after 1918 (as evidenced by the Bund’s boycott of the first parliamentary election in independent Poland). The Bund’s reticent attitude towards the newly re-established Polish state was mainly due to the fact, evident right from the beginning of the Second Republic, that the Jews were not granted an equal status. They were deprived of a proportional participation in state administration, and had restricted access to such areas of public life as education in public schools, the officer corps, the judiciary, jobs at postal offices or railways, and also, indirectly, to jobs in large industrial plants.

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It was only in the second part of the 1930s that the Bund’s isolation in Poland came to an end (on account of its alliance with the PPS). This tendency continued during the years of the Second World War, when the Bund was active in the Nazi-occupied ghettos of Poland, and in the Polish government in exile. Historians, however, are interested not so much in the success or failure of the Bund’s ‘external’ political tactics, or in the fate of its strategic alliances, but first and foremost, in its actual, measurable steps towards Jewish emancipation, and towards the creation of modern Jewish national self-awareness and the cultural foundations of such awareness. It is not, therefore, merely the Bund’s program which has become the focus of historical attention, but the entire extensive political, educational and cultural infrastructure which the Bund created: its mass-scale economic campaigns to improve the living conditions of Jewish workers; its dynamically growing involvement in urban self-government; its pioneer activity to promote modern education of Jewish children and adolescents, and its efforts to modernize Yiddish culture. This was the Bund’s method: to gradually pull the Jewish masses living in Eastern Europe out of their hopeless existence and to pave the way for them towards modernity. These forms of the Bund’s activity developed dynamically in the 1930s, when its period of internal in-fighting came to an end and party consolidation became possible. Conditions were gradually created which made possible a rapprochement between the Bund and the PPS. This process was, however, by no means easy. The PPS could hardly forget its old grievances. On its part, the Bund accused the PPS of entering political alliances with bourgeois parties. As a matter of fact, collaboration between the PPS – with a membership ten times that of the Bund – and the Bund became real only in 1932, and was never devoid of some frictions and conflicts. Generally speaking, the twenty-year period between the two world wars demonstrated that the Bund’s electorate was quite stable in spite of a significant evolution in the party’s orientation. This evolution was tantamount to the Bund’s gradual departure from its sui generis socialist fundamentalism. It ought to be recalled that in the 1920s the Bund was probably the only significant social democratic party in Europe whose views were close to those of the pre-1918 revolutionary Left of German social democracy. Later on – and especially in the 1930s – the Bund underwent an evolution towards reformism which was similar to that which had already affected most European social

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democratic parties at the end of the nineteenth century. The Bund’s evolution came a little late, but its direction was unequivocal and concurrent with the evolution of West European social democrats. Owing to this fact, the Bund found itself in one rank with other modern parties which are currently credited with having played an important role in the process of building a democratic Europe. A very special chapter in the Bund’s history is devoted to its involvement in the resistance movement in the ghettos of occupied Poland. This activity is important not only in that it adds to the Bund’s historical image, but also in that it dispels a myth that the Jews humbly subordinated themselves to the Nazi program of extermination. The Bund disappeared from the political scene in Eastern Europe, where its main bastions had once been situated, i.e., from the territory of the former Russian Empire and, later on, also from the Republic of Poland, because of two major historic disasters. It disappeared from Russia as a result of a ruthless Bolshevik policy of political monopoly which was conducted after 1917, and as a result of the human, political, social and cultural ravages which accompanied that policy and which were inflicted upon the Bund by the totalitarian regime. It disappeared from Poland through the extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime. The remnants of the Bund’s structures in Poland after World War II were liquidated due to the same aspirations to political monopoly that had earlier appeared in Soviet Russia. Accordingly, the stepping down of the Bund from the political scene cannot be attributed to its program and policies, but to catastrophes that affected the entire civilization. In August of 1996, I attended a historical congress in Basel devoted to the centennial of the Zionist movement. Alternatives to Zionism – those offered by religious parties, the Communists, and by assimilationists – were mentioned. What struck me most, however, was that none of the interesting and important papers that were presented at the congress in Basel made even the smallest reference to the Bund. This is but one more proof that the initiative to assess the Bund on the hundredth anniversary of its creation is by all means a necessary one. The Bund was the first modern mass political movement that promoted the maintenance and development of Jewish national identity. It was the first one because, although it was established in the very same year as the Zionist movement, it had far greater impact than did the latter in the first decade of its operation. The revolution of 1905–7 marked the culmination point of the Bund’s development. Later on, too, the Bund played a very important role in the development of

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modern Jewish national identity in Eastern Europe, and, via the émigrés coming from that area, also helped some American Jews with their aspirations towards modernity. So it is by no means an organization that historians should allow to be forgotten.

List of Abbreviations ASKÖ BBWR CGT . CKZ P ECCI ESDRP-PZ GPSD ISB KPDO KPP KPRP KRN LSI NKVD OZON PCP PKWN PLP PPR PPS PPSD PPSdFR PSR PZPR RSDRP SAPD SDAP SDF SDKPiL SERP SKIF SOSHAYF SPD SS TOZ TSYSHO WJC YAF YIVO . Z PS

Workers’ Federation for Sports and Physical Culture in Austria Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government General Confederation of Labor Central Committee of the Jews in Poland Executive Committee of the Communist International Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party Poalei-Zion Social Democratic Party of Galicia International Socialist Bureau Communist Party of Germany – Opposition Communist Party of Poland Communist Workers’ Party of Poland The National Council Labour and Socialist International People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs Camp of National Unity Palestinian Communist Party Polish Committee of National Liberation Progressive List for Peace Polish Workers’ Party Polish Socialist Party Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Upper Silesia Polish Socialist Party - Former Revolutionary Fraction Party of Socialist Revolutionaries Polish United Workers’ Party Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany Social Democratic Workers’ Party [of Austria] Social Democratic Federation [of the United Kingdom] Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party Socialist Children’s Union Socialist Writers’ Union Social Democratic Party of Germany Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party Society for the Protection of Health Central Organization of Jewish Schools The World Jewish Congress Jewish Worker-Women Yiddish Scientific Institute Jewish Social Democratic Party in Galicia

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Notes on the Contributors Natalia Aleksiun, a doctoral student in the Department of History, Warsaw University, is currently working on a dissertation on the Zionist movement in Poland between 1944 and 1950. She was a Skirball Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 1997, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, during the academic year 1998–9, and a Fulbright Fellow at New York University from 1999 to . 2000. She has published in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, Midrasz and in Jews in Eastern Europe. Daniel Blatman, Lecturer at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, is the author of For Our Freedom and Yours: The Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (which appeared in Hebrew in 1996, and which is forthcoming in English), and of numerous articles on the Holocaust and on the history of the Jews in twentieth-century Poland. Abraham Brumberg was born in Poland, grew up in a Bundist atmosphere, and was for nearly twenty years Editor in Chief of the journal Problems of Communism. He edited Poland: Genesis of a Revolution (1983), and Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western–Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika (1990), among other volumes, and has contributed essays and reviews to many periodicals, including Midrasz. John Bunzl, Research Fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna, was born in London in 1945 to parents who were Austrian Jewish refugees. He is the author of Klassenkampf in der Diaspora (1975), and of Between Vienna and Jerusalem (1997), and has also published widely on Jewish history, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East. Nathan Cohen, Lecturer at the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar-Ilan University and Assistant Editor of Yad-Vashem Studies, was born in Jerusalem in 1961, and received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University. His research interests are in the cultural history of Polish Jewry between the two world wars. xxii

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David Engel is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University, a Fellow of the Diaspora Research Institute at Tel Aviv University, and Editor of Gal-Ed. He is the author of In the Shadow of Auschwitz (1987), Facing a Holocaust (1993), and Between Liberation and Flight (which was published in Hebrew in 1996). François Guesnet, Research Fellow at the Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur and a Lecturer at Leipzig University, is author of Polnische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert: Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel (1998). He specializes in Eastern European Jewish social history. Jack Jacobs, Professor of Government at John Jay College, the City University of New York, served as a Fulbright Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University in 1996–7. He is the author of On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (1992), and has also published in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, the International Review of Social History, MEGA-Studien, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and YIVO Annual. Mario Kessler, Research Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science (Otto-Suhr-Institut), Free University of Berlin, is the author of Antisemitismus, Zionismus und Sozialismus (1993), Zionismus und internationale Arbeiterbewegung 1897 bis 1933 (1994), Die SED und die Juden – zwischen Repression und Toleranz. Politische Entwicklungen bis 1967 (1995), and of Heroische Illusion und Stalin-Terror (1999). Rick Kuhn is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Australian National University in Canberra, and is involved in the trade union and international socialist movements. He is co-editor (with Tom O’Lincoln) of Class and Class Conflict in Australia (1996), and has published in Capital and Class, Labour History, Left History, Monthly Review, and Science and Society. He is currently working on a biography of Henryk Grossmann, a founder of the Galician Bund and later a wellknown economic theorist. Susanne Marten-Finnis, Senior Lecturer in German and Head of German Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast, received her Ph.D. in Germanistic linguistics at the Neuphilologicum of Tübingen University. She is the author of Pressesprache zwischen Stalinismus und Demokratie: Parteijournalismus im ‘Neuen Deutschland,’ 1946–1993

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(1994) and the co-author (with Heather Valencia) of Sprachinseln. Jiddische Publizistik in London, Wilna und Berlin 1880–1930 (1999). Her research is currently centered on the Jewish press in Vilna. Susanne Miller, born in 1915 in Sofia (Bulgaria), was brought up in Vienna in a family of Jewish origin, converted to Protestantism as a small child, lived in England between 1937 and 1946, received her Ph.D. in 1963 at Bonn University, and was head of the SPD’s Historical Commission from 1982 until 1990. She is co-author (with Heinrich Potthoff) of A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the Present (1982), and has also written a large number of other works. Yoav Peled is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Tel Aviv University and is the author of Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (1989). Gertrud Pickhan, Assistant Professor of Polish Culture at the Technische Universität, Dresden, has published several articles on Bundist history, including one which appeared in Polin (1997), and a piece entitled ‘“Jakobs Berliner Kinder.” Ein Warschauer Bundist im jüdischen Berliner Theater 1935,’ in: ‘Der Fremde im Dorf.’ Überlegungen zum Eigenen und zum Fremden in der Geschichte. Rex Rexheuser zum 65. Geburtstag (1998). Pawel´ Samus´, Professor of History at the University of Lodz, works primarily on Polish political and social history between 1918 and 1939. He is the author of Dzieje SDKPiL w ´Lodzi 1893–1918 (1984) and . an editor and co-author of Polacy – Niemcy – Z ydzi w ´Lodzi w XIX–XX w. Sasiedzi dalecy i bliscy (1997). ‘ Feliks Tych, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, has written a number of works on Russian, Polish, and European social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including monographs on the beginning of the Polish labor movement and on the revolution of 1905 in the Polish lands, and has edited, among many other volumes, a biographical lexicon of the labor movement in Poland. Marek Web is Head Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He served as research director for the film Lodz Ghetto: A Community under Siege (1989), and has curated a number of exhibitions of Jewish documents. He is co-editor (with Mark Kupovetskii and

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Evgenii Starostin) of Jewish Documentary Sources in Moscow Archives (which appeared in Russian in 1997) and is also co-editor (with Fruma Mohrer) of Guide to the YIVO Archives (1998). Claudie Weill, a historian at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), is the author of Marxistes russes et social-démocratie allemande, 1898–1904 (1977), L’Internationale et l’autre: Les relations inter-ethniques dans la Deuxième Internationale (1987), and of Étudiants russes en Allemagne, 1900–1914 (1996), and is also studying exiles after World War I at the crossroads between culture and politics. Russian Jews were central figures in many respects. Piotr Wróbel, who currently holds the Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies at the University of Toronto, received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1984, emigrated to the United States in 1988, and has taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Michigan State University (East Lansing), and at the University of California (Davis). He has authored or co-authored seven books, including Historical Dictionary of Poland, 1945–1996 (1998). Joshua D. Zimmerman, Assistant Professor of East European Jewish History at Yeshiva University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1997–8 and has published in East European Jewish Affairs. His contribution to The Bund at 100 is part of a broader study, ‘Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: Relations between the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Imperial Russia, 1897–1914,’ now in preparation.

Part I In the Years of the Russian Empire

1 Khevres and Akhdes: the Change in Jewish Self-organization in the Kingdom of Poland before 1900 and the Bund François Guesnet

Of the 4 800 000 Jews living in the Russian Empire at the turn of the century, almost a third (1 300 000) lived in the Kingdom of Poland.1 The two largest Jewish communities in the Empire at that time, those of Warsaw and Lodz, which were also two of the largest Jewish settlements in the world, were located in the Kingdom. Several aspects of the development of Jewish self-organization in the Kingdom of Poland in the nineteenth century will be explored in this chapter, focusing particularly on the conditions of existence and on the form of Jewish professional organization. Against the background of this description, an assessment will be made of the extent, if any, to which the creation of Bund organizations in the Kingdom represented a new quality of Jewish self-organization.

In the traditional organizational structure of the Jewish community in the Polish Commonwealth, the fraternities of the various crafts were an important but not the central element. Superordinate to these was the corporative authority of the community itself, the kahal [kool] and the rabbinate, with all the complex institutions associated with them. In addition, there existed in all communities a complex structure of charitable and religious fraternal associations within which a tightly meshed net of social and political control as well as material support was created, in part through multiple memberships and in part through the delegation of overseers to the executive committees of these associations by the community elders. As for the employmentrelated sphere of Jewish self-organization, a completely different 3

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

picture emerges for the two most important branches of employment beginning with the end of the eighteenth century, namely commerce and craft. Jews involved in commerce regarded it as an honorable duty to belong to various communal societies and religious fraternal associations (khevres) but did not organize as merchants in merchants’ khevres;2 Jewish artisans, on the other hand, founded numerous occupationally related guild-like associations. Like all other fraternal associations, these were subject to the control of the kahal, which could offer them support should they come into conflict with competing Christian guilds or with the magistrate. The extensive Jewish autonomy which this complex organizational structure afforded finally came to an end not with the end of the Polish Commonwealth but only with the dissolution of the kahal in 1822 and the associated banning of all Jewish fraternal associations. The consequences for Jewish self-organization were grave. The introduction of a quasi-official, community executive committee (dozór bozniczy) that was subject to strong state control resulted in a shift of intra-community authority to the burial societies.3 Although the latter were illegal, they managed to survive as a kind of community leadership throughout the nineteenth century. The apparatus of Jewish associations continued to exist despite legal regulations, but it is clear that illegality represented a considerable impediment to their activities. This was particularly true for the khevres of Jewish artisans. The new basis for artisanal organization was the guild ordinance of 1816, according to which a guild had to have a Christian elder.4 What options were available to a Jewish artisan who wanted to join a guild as a means of realizing his material interests and satisfying his social and religious needs? Entering into a Christian guild was all but impossible owing to the objection of Christians to the idea of organizing together with Jews. Another option was that of electing a Christian front man as the elder of an artisanal guild with an exclusively Jewish membership. Thus far we have been able to establish only that this practice took place, without, however, being able to estimate how widespread it was.5 Finally, there remained the option of continuing to run the guild according to the old pattern and simply accepting the fact that one was a member of a formally illegal organization. We can document the existence of all three forms of Jewish self-organization, although considerable regional differences need to be taken into consideration. Thus, one can document the existence of a relatively large number of mixed artisanal guilds in Lublin for the last quarter of the nineteenth century,6 while in Lodz, due to the influence of the

Jewish Self-organization in Poland before 1900

5

German weavers settling there, a wholesale exclusion of Jewish membership in such organizations was the rule.7 We learn of the existence of such non-legal artisanal organizations in part through the efforts they made, in vain, to obtain legal status throughout the nineteenth century, and partly through the preliminary legal proceedings taken against them. Thus, during an investigation of Jewish schools and prayer houses in 1883, the police in Lodz uncovered evidence of several dozen such organizations as well as three khevres (Russ. bractvo) of butchers and one each of gravediggers, bakers and weavers.8 Several factors have led me to believe that this form of self-organization – that is, illegal but exclusively Jewish khevres – predominated among Jewish artisans in Poland in the nineteenth century. First, Jewish guild-like associations were never institutions that exclusively represented estate interests, a function which these khevres did in fact lose. They also offered a means of attaining social standing and of satisfying religious needs. Many of these fraternities – including those of artisanal apprentices – had their own prayer houses, a feature which could, and indeed was supposed to, document the status of a professional group in the religious community.9 Membership was highly formalized; a candidate for membership had to satisfy criteria regarding age, marital status, and/or property. Despite the illegal status of the organization, a member could perform a wide variety of charitable acts and thereby behave in a manner ‘pleasing to God,’ through, for example, donating money or assisting needy members, or nonmembers. Self-organization in khevres offered a means of integrating into a threatened but nonetheless still existing, religiously based Jewish community (the values of which these khevres embodied). The fundamentally conservative character of these institutions is also revealed in their continuation of patriarchal relations, expressed in the exclusion of women from membership.10 A further reason to assume that Jewish fraternal organization continued well into the nineteenth century and beyond is the lack of available alternatives. In contrast to other countries, where at least some possibility existed of crossing over into spheres of life and activity previously reserved only for Christians, the situation in Poland was characterized by an increasing informal exclusion of Jews. The city of Lodz will, in the following, serve as an example to describe the beginnings of the Bund in the Kingdom of Poland and to reflect on the extent to which the Bund’s creation meant a new quality of Jewish self-organization.

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The accounts of the two most important authors for this case, Hertz [Herts] and Yasni, agree on most points. Both emphasize the poverty of the Jewish weavers, tending to use the terms ‘weaver’ and ‘worker’ in a relatively unspecific way.11 The social stratum of Jews from which the membership of the Bund was originally recruited in Lodz can be characterized as proletarianized artisans (mostly weavers). The exclusion of Jews from the large, mechanized textile factories is generally cited as a decisive reason why Jews were not workers in the sense of ‘factory workers.’12 But not only in their occupational structure were the Jewish weavers of Lodz not workers. In their self-image, as well, they remained, above all, independent artisans who dreamed of upward mobility, ‘quick riches’ (Yasni), and entrepreneurial success.13 Hertz quotes the foremost Jewish factory owner in Lodz, Yisroel Poznanski, who, when asked why he did not employ Jews in his factory, replied that he needed 6 000 workers, and not 6 000 business partners.14 The form of self-organization favored by the Jewish weavers was just as traditional as their self-image. Several factors point to the existence of a number of fraternal associations among Jewish weavers in Lodz. In 1843, a deceived member denounced an illegally extant weavers’ khevra, and, in 1889, a group of Jewish weavers asked for the registration of a Jewish crafts guild.15 At the same time, attempts at socialist agitation among this population were largely unsuccessful; Jewish artisans kept their distance from the Polish workers’ movement, not least because of the pogrom that followed the May 1st demonstration of 1892.16 The fact that they were stuck in an economic dead end – namely the putting-out system – did not threaten the Jewish weavers’ self-image as independent artisans. The demand for hand-produced raw textiles dropped with the spread of mechanized industrial production. Homework functioned to satisfy the need for extra work during times of increased demand. This form of production nevertheless remained widespread until the turn of the century. In 1900 in Lodz, for example, there were 65 wholesale contractors for the local homework industry, which had a turnover of over 10 000 000 rubles.17 When sales dropped, manufacturers initially responded by ceasing to purchase the output of homeworkers while continuing to process the – less expensive – goods produced by the large factories.18 Another threat to the Jewish weavers was posed by the incredible pressure of immigration, which, within a very brief period of time, had filled the ‘Promised Land’ of Lodz to bursting point. Thus, in applying to found a weavers’ guild in 1889, the Jewish weavers hoped to obtain an instrument for

Jewish Self-organization in Poland before 1900

7

the regulation of immigration and of work as a weaver. However, the guild was not approved. The pace of the proletarianization of Jewish weavers increased in a spiral of oversupply of labor, low labor costs, and worsening working conditions. Over the course of the 1890s, the income of the average weaver fell from 8–10 to 4–5 rubles per week. The history of the Bund in Lodz began in the autumn of 1897, when Russian-Jewish social democrats living in Warsaw sent a representative to Lodz for the purpose of socialist agitation and organization. The emissary, Yitskhok Mordekhai Peysakhzon, a former member of the Narodniki, originated from Shklov in White Russia. He belonged to a group of Russian Jews in Warsaw who were active in the social-democratic movement and whose goal was the formation of an exclusively Jewish labor organization. These immigrant social democrats quickly came into conflict with their local Jewish counterparts, who tended to support the patriotically inclined PPS.19 Peysakhzon’s deputation to Lodz undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the competition between these two factions. He began his recruiting mission among the proletarianized Jewish weavers of Lodz, who were concentrated in the poor suburb of Baluty. There, he met Ayzyk Alter, a social-democratic weaver from Bialystok, and several freshly converted Baptists of Jewish origin, who, according to Hertz, were ‘intelligent weavers – god-seekers, who in their seeking fell under the influence of Baptist missionaries. These weavers were successfully convinced of the socialist ideal, and torn away from the Baptists. The new converts threw themselves into the new movement with religious zeal.’20 During this phase, the work of the Bund was limited to the distribution of leaflets and brochures. Nevertheless, according to Peysakhzon, in view of the backward character of Polish Jews, even this restricted activity was not without risk: ‘The indescribable fear of “politics” had embedded itself deep in the psyche of all segments of Polish Jewry. Due to “cicilism” [socialism], the wildest stories were circulating among the masses.’ Additional agitators, both male and female, were later sent from Vitebsk, Vilna, Bialystok and Minsk. However, this phase of party work was cut short in July 1898, on the evening of the first gathering of Jewish weavers organized by the Bund, when, during a large-scale, multi-city police action led by Zubatov, Head of the Gendarmerie (State Police), 18 agitators were arrested.21 According to the State Police’s version of events, these early efforts by the Bund were rather ineffective.22 Until 1900, the activity of the remaining activists was limited to the distribution of

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

illegal literature. Plans were made to form workers’ circles and funds (kases) and to hold meetings, but they were not carried out. In 1900, the arrival of a fresh group of agitators led to the recruitment of new local activists, mainly artisan youth. Among them were several women. Over the next year, the enlarged organization expanded its activities considerably: regular meetings were held, which now included political agitation; a committee and a fund were created. In 1902, a militant group was formed, whose actions were directed against employers, officials, strike resisters, and foremen, and whose goal was to extort money for the organization. In a wide-scale action against the Bund in Lodz at the beginning of 1903, the state police arrested 48 activists. Among them were nine women. From documents filed by the prosecutor’s office, age and city of origin can be determined in 19 cases. Five of the activists arrested were between 14 and 18 years old. Seven were from Baluty and Lodz; the rest were born in cities in the region: Kutno, Brzeziny, Gabin, Sieradz and others. The report of a razzia against a political meeting in Lodz in January 1905 sheds light on the composition of such a meeting in the pre-revolutionary phase: among the arrested were three 15-, 16- and 18-year-olds who attended ‘gymnasium,’ and five ‘Jewish workers,’ 18 to 21 years old. Documents of another investigation against Bund pioneers in Lodz show the high percentage of Jews from Lithuania. One of them, Leyb Sholonim, ‘came to live in the town of Lodz together with [Rebeka] Tverska with the exclusive goal of spreading propaganda among the Jewish workers, for which reason Sholonim recommended to Tverska that she learn zhargon [Yiddish]. In addition, he became correspondent of the underground periodicals of the Bund in London.’23 Even on the basis of this cursory description of the early phase of the Bund in Lodz, one can draw some far-reaching conclusions. The socialdemocratic agitation begun by members of the Bund in Lodz represented a fundamental qualitative change in Jewish selforganization. Let us summarize the most important distinguishing features of this new organzational form. It was completely cut off from the traditional patterns and authorities of the Jewish community. A central feature of this new pattern is the complete and ostentative distancing from any form of religiosity.24 Important characteristics of the khevres are lacking: the very first groups of Bund agitators were mixed-sex groups, and women were among the first Bund members in Lodz, a characteristic the significance of which cannot be overestimated. Leadership positions were occupied not by leading local

Jewish Self-organization in Poland before 1900

9

families, but by Jews from Russia who came to Lodz for this purpose. Membership in these early Bundist groups did not confer any form of recognition in the Jewish community and naturally was not regarded as a mitsve (good deed) in the sense understood by the ruling religious authorities – here I refer only in passing to the deep-seated animosity of the Lodz Rabbi Mayzel to the social-democratically engaged Jews. These characteristics appear in a report to the SDKPiL newspaper Kurierek Robotniczy describing the burial of a Jewish worker and socialist, Moyshe Konopnitski, who had been killed while being arrested: ‘At the cemetery a female comrade held a speech, and when she ended, all comrades took off their caps and shouted “Hurra!”, after which they sang the workers’ anthem. All this infuriated the old unconscious [non-class conscious] Jews, and especially the old rabbi Mayzel, who on the spot tried to phone to the police, in which [effort] he did not succeed, as the comrades had torn off the wire.’25 The decisive unifying characteristic of the early Bund groups was no longer religion – witness the readiness to recruit converted Jews from among the Baptists – or the religious community, but the idea of association and unity, as adopted by the emerging labor movement. The call of Marx ‘Proletarians of all countries, Unite’ aimed at a substantial improvement of the material living conditions of the working classes, the emancipation of labor, and the struggle against the political system itself.26 The idea that workers should unite among themselves to associate with their comrades from other nations appealed to pioneers of the Jewish labor movement, who referred to it in Yiddish as akhdes. An early reference to it is to be found in 1876 (a generation before the creation of the Bund), in the announcement of the first meeting of the Hebrew Socialist Union in London. In it, Aron Liberman formulated the need for Jewish workers to unite in the same way Christian workers did: ‘the Christian workers are united in societies. Here in England, these are the trade unions, an association of thousands of worker societies of different professions, who all hold together tightly and do not allow themselves to be oppressed by their . . . masters.’ He goes on to argue that the difference between these Christians and the Jewish workers is that ‘among our Jewish workers there is no unity [akhdes], therefore the masters can oppress us as they like.’ 27 The Bund, sharing with Liberman a common, socialist basis, stood firmly by the idea of working-class unity, and regarded itself as the representative of the Jewish component of the working class. Within Polish Jewry, it could get a firm hold only where the old forms of social cohesion had become untenable or

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

dubious – which was as true for the poor weavers’ neighborhood of Lodz-Baluty as it had been a generation earlier among the Jewish immigrant workers in London. Due precisely to these preconditions, regional differences in the further course of development of the Bund in the Kingdom of Poland can be observed. When the Bund began its agitation in Lublin, a nonindustrialized urban center, its members were recruited not only among craftsmen, but also among petty traders and commerce employees. Conspiratorial meetings, attended even at an early point by several hundred people, were held in the rooms of the registered ‘Association of Commerce Employees’ (Tovaristva prikascikov), a milieu that differed significantly from that of the young weavers in Baluty.28 The fundamentally new quality of Jewish self-organization that began with the emergence of the Bund in the Kingdom – the closest parallel to which can be seen in the development of Zionism during the same period – is revealed in numerous testimonies. I quote in conclusion from the description given by an early Lodz Bundist, of the first time he attended a conspiratorial Bund meeting: ‘[The speaker] talked about exploitation and being taken advantage of, and the necessity of uniting [az m’darf makhn akhdes]. . . . I left the secret meeting satisfied and in a fighting spirit and felt that some kind of a great and important change had taken place in my poor weaver’s life.’29

Notes 1. A. Nossig (ed.), Jüdische Statistik (Berlin, 1903), pp. 266ff. 2. This is refered to in S. W. Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution, vol. III (Philadelphia, 1942), p. 94, note 21. 3. It should be noted that legislation on the status of the Jewish communities differed greatly in Congress Poland and Russia itself, where the kahal was not abolished until 1844. Cf. F. Guesnet, Polnische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert: Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel (Cologne, Vienna, 1998), pp. 223–9, 396–413. 4. Ibid., pp. 61–3. 5. For Lublin, we know of the case of a hostile takeover of a Christian guild through the establishment of a Jewish majority: see J. Kaminski, ´ Z przeszl os ´ ci cechu krawieckiego w Lublinie (Lublin, 1933), pp. 41–3. ´ 6. Archiwum Pa´nstwowe w Lublinie, Akta miasta Lublina 1874–1915 (Town records), sign. 9069, 9070, 9072, 9094, regarding the major guilds of a variety of handicrafts. 7. F. Guesnet, Lodzer Juden im 19. Jahrhundert. Ihr Ort in einer multikulturellen

Jewish Self-organization in Poland before 1900

11

Stadtgesellschaft (Leipzig, 1997), pp. 11–14. 8. Archiwum Pa´nstwowe w ´Lodzi (AP Lodz, State Archive in Lodz), Policmajstr miasta ´Lodzi (Head of the Lodz Police Department), sign. 100, pp. 178–83. 9. Guesnet, Lodzer Juden, op. cit., pp. 23f. 10. Guesnet, Polnische Juden, op. cit., pp. 166–75. 11. They follow a pattern which had been introduced much earlier by authors such as L. Soloweitschik, Un prolétariat méconnu. Étude sur la situation sociale et économique des ouvriers juifs (Brussels, 1898), who regarded as a worker almost every physically working person. 12. E. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 21f. 13. A. V. Yasni, Geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter-bavegung in lodz (Lodz, 1937), p. 90. For a contemporary account of Lodz as attracting numerous Jews from all over Russia, cf. M. Donkhin, ‘Korespondentsia, Lodz 25.10.1884,’ Voskhod, 3 (1884), cols 1290–2. 14. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Di geshikhte fun bund in lodz (New York, 1958), p. 25. . . 15. F. Friedman, Dzieje Z ydów w ´Lodzi od pocza tków osadnictwa Z ydów do r. 1863 ‘ (Lodz, 1935), pp. 190–2; Yasni, Geshikhte, op. cit., p. 93; cf. the police report mentioned above, note 8. 16. Yasni, Geshikhte, op. cit., p. 89. 17. Ibid., p. 91. 18. This concerns the sweat-shops in the Lodz region as well, which were predominantly Jewish and as sensitive to economic stagnation as the Lodz home-weavers,. cf. Guesnet, Polnische Juden, op. cit., pp. 107–10. 19. H. Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja PPS 1893–1907 (Wrocl´aw, 1978), pp. 14–21. 20. Hertz, Di geshikhte, op. cit., p. 58. This episode is also in Yasni, Geshikhte, op. cit., p. 98. . 21. AP Lodz, Piotrkowski Gubernialny Zarzad Z andarmerii (State Police ‘ Administration in the Province of Piotrkow), sign. 54, report of March 2, 1903. 22. Ibid. . 23. AP Lodz, Piotrkowski Gubernialny Zarzad Z andarmerii, sign. 784, p. 43. ‘ Sholonim was one of eight supposed Bund members who were arrested, five of whom originated from Lithuania. 24. Nevertheless, one should keep in mind the religious character of the agitation language of the Bund, as has been shown by Susanne Marten-Finnis (cf. this volume, Chapter 2). 25. Kurierek Robotniczy, V, 2 (1901) 7–12; cited following F. Tych (ed.), Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy. Material´y i dokumenty, vol. I, Part 2 (1899–1901) (Warsaw, 1962), no. 63, p. 203. 26. K. Marx, ‘Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association,’ Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. XX, Part 1 (Berlin, 1992), pp. 13ff. 27. Handbill reprinted in W. Fishman, Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Stetl to London Ghetto (New York, 1974), between pages 116 and 117. On Liberman, cf. J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 28–48, esp. 33f.

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28. Archiwum Pa´nstwowe w Lublinie, report August 7, .1907, to the Chief of the State Police in the Lublin Province, Zarzad Z andarmerii Gubernii ‘ Lubelskiej, sign. 480, p. 10. The report indicates that 600 people attended the Bund meeting. 29. Hertz, Di geshikhte, op. cit., p. 79.

2 The Bundist Press: a Study of Political Change and the Persistence of Anachronistic Language during the Russian Period Susanne Marten-Finnis

The beginning of the Bundist press was triggered by the decision to leave the narrow circles of Russian propaganda and to start mass agitation in Yiddish. But in order to put this idea into practice, three major problems of communication had to be overcome in pre-revolutionary Russia: the fact that few people could produce newspaper texts in Yiddish, the conspiratorial nature of all revolutionary activities, and the low literacy rate of the masses. If the masses were to understand what Marxism was about, the literacy rate had to be raised. To this end the Bundist press was able to profit from the strong traditions of the modern Jewish press as an enlightening and educational medium which is intended to guide its readers. In this chapter I will try to shed some light on how this process was started, and some of its consequences.

Why would the Bundists find it difficult to produce literature in Yiddish? Russified Jewish intellectuals, often detached from their roots, had ceased to speak Yiddish long ago whereas the Jewish workers hardly spoke any Russian. Consequently, new members had to be recruited who were able to speak and write Yiddish well enough to produce newspaper texts which the average Jewish worker was able to understand. As a contemporary recalled, some of them came ‘from the Vilna high schools; apart from that, the Vilna Teachers’ Institute could provide such intellectuals. Other sources of healthy cadres were the 13

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

yeshives [Talmud academies]. We called them “Polintelligenty” – halfintellectuals. Their Yiddish was much better than the Yiddish of our own propagandists; also they were able to handle the Jewish working masses better.’1 Gozshanski gave a more detailed description of the function of the half-intellectuals: A specific Jewish workers’ movement only started developing after we had started addressing the workers in Yiddish. Just before the individual revolutionary cells united into the Bund a completely new element joined our movement: a kind of a ‘intermediate layer’ with whom we had not been in touch so far: the so-called half-intellectuals, comrades who had been brought up with Jewish literature, who could speak and write Hebrew and Yiddish fluently; they were not Russified, they had not become detached from Jewish culture. Their Russian was however not as good. Anyway, we found a new layer of people who could handle the tool we were not able to handle – to write and speak Yiddish to the Jewish worker. . . . Unlike us, these new comrades had a national attitude; they represented a national Jewish intelligentsia . . . a new national element in our organization.2 Consequently, these half-intellectuals, mostly having been brought up in the traditional Jewish way, now came to function as a ‘funnel’ through which Bundist leaders began to introduce their agenda to their followers. This brings me to another phenomenon typical of Bundist periodicals: the fact that they functioned as mouthpieces, i.e. they did not see their main purpose in the conveying of facts and comments but rather wanted to guide their readers, educate them and lead them in a certain – in this case Marxist – direction. However, when the issue of periodicals was first discussed, Jewish revolutionaries had something more in mind: an organ that could ‘faraynigen di arbeyter fun alle shtedt un alle melokhes’ (unify the workers of all towns and crafts).3 The possibility of editing such an organ had first been discussed at a conference in Minsk in June 1895.4 Its tremendous importance was obvious to all conference participants: an organ of this kind could link the isolated Jewish revolutionary cells in the Northwestern Provinces and Poland and thereby channel them into one strong socialist organization. Such an organ, moreover, could function as a communicator, enhancing cooperation – a pre-condition for joint action.5 None other than Lenin himself copied this principle and applied it to the organ of his own party. He formulated what was later to become

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

15

known as the basis of communist press theory:6 that the press had to be a ‘collective propagandist, a collective organizer of the masses around the party, and an invisible bond between party and working class.’7 The conspiratorial nature of Bundist press communication had its implications for topicality and reader-friendliness. Many Bundist press items, although conceived in Russia, had to be printed abroad. Taking into account the length of their journey from authors to readers, these articles could not report on or react to any current events within local labor movements; whenever an attempt to be topical was made there was always the risk that unconfirmed or out-of-date information would get through. A further consequence of the fact that Bundist literature was often illegal was that it was sometimes presented in a manner meant to deceive those who were likely to be unsympathetic to it. The predecessors of the first Bundist periodicals, the early brochures published by Russian Jewish socialists, made use of the so-called ‘Vilna Tactic.’ While the content of many brochures was treyf (‘not kosher’), their cover was kosher, as, for example, the brochure Rabochi Den – Arbeyts tog which carried the innocent title Lang un moger, along with the stamps: ‘printed in Vilna by the publishing house of the widow and the brothers Romm,’ and ‘Dozvolieno tsenzuroi’ (approved by the censor).8 Both the phenomenon of the half-intellectuals and the conspiratorial nature of socialist publications in pre-revolutionary Russia are essential factors which have often been neglected in studies of the language of socialism. Linguists, both within post-revolutionary Russia9 and among émigrés10 in the early 1920s, tended to equate the beginning of the language of socialism with the success of the October Revolution in 1917. It is true that many new Russian words which have come into being since 1917 closely reflect, and owe their existence to, the new social and political structures of the Soviet Union. But there is a second group of new philosophical, political, and economic words that existed in Russia before 1917, and even before 1905. The spread of these was, however, restricted to certain social groups, mainly urban, namely the participants in the revolutionary movements,11 of which the Bund was one. Thirdly, the desired mass character of revolutionary movements implied that new concepts and values had to be brought to and explained to the masses in a way they could understand. Now, especially in pre-revolutionary Russia, the uptake of such new ideas was hindered by serious restrictions on the means of communication: I have already mentioned the conspiratorial nature of revolutionary

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activities and its consequences for their press organs, which were forced to stay underground. A second hurdle was that the masses had a low literacy rate, which had to be raised in order to make them understand what class struggle was about. The literacy campaigns, aiming at the inclusion of more and more people in the revolutionary movement, therefore presumed on the one hand a willingness to take words of foreign origin, such as those of the French Revolution, and loan translations (calques) into one’s own language. On the other hand, they implied a tolerance towards borrowings from vernaculars and also from other languages which may have been spoken in the country at the time.12 The discrepancy between the relatively demanding Marxist concepts and the low literacy rate of the people in Russia presented a major problem, which was to be addressed in different ways in different periods by revolutionary activists from different camps. According to Leninist principles, it could only be countered by the creation of a ‘completely new type of newspaper.’ In 1912 this principle led to the publication of Pravda. However, the Bundist press had taken the lack of education among the Jewish people into account at least 15 years earlier. The fact that the process of education via the medium of the periodical press was practiced first on the Yiddish and later on the Russian-speaking masses, suggests that perhaps Jewish didactic concepts were copied by Russian-speaking revolutionaries. This seems indeed to have been the case, and I shall look further into this process later on. Regrettably, the efforts of post-revolutionary Russian linguists to study such matters were followed by decades of complete abstinence from the topic, and it was not until 1978 that the subject attracted the attention of the Oxford linguists Comrie and Stone, who attempted to illustrate and to trace the changes that have taken place in the Russian language since the beginning of the century.13 According to them, the reflection in language of extra-linguistic reality is easier to demonstrate on the lexical level than on any other, and the social motivation of linguistic change is consequently most easily demonstrated by change in vocabulary. The appearance of new things, concepts, qualities, activities, etc., is always accompanied or quickly followed (and sometimes even preceded) by changes in the lexical system. New words appear and old words change their meaning. Naming things was, however, only one stage in the process of educating the masses. Explaining them to the masses ‘erklehren fun klasn shtands punkt fershidene lebns fragn,’14 as Der yidisher arbeyter

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

17

defined it in 1896 – was another one. And it is these explanations, a didactic concept originally applied by the Bund, which later on were copied by Russian-speaking leaders. This means that not only the organizational institutions and structures of communication (central committee, party conferences, central organ, etc.)15 were copied from the Bund after 1903 but also its didactic concepts, many of them originally transmitted by the half-intellectuals who had a traditional Jewish education. Now their didactic concepts found their way via loan translations into Russian-speaking organs. It is obvious that not all of them could be absorbed; it also seems that not all the meanings of a phrase were translated, or translated correctly. And it is clear that a Jewish didactic concept, having been translated, would no longer be applied in its original social environment. Having traveled to a different social environment, to people whose historic memory and experience was not necessarily associated with them, their full meaning could hardly be preserved. I will therefore concentrate only on those which have been applied successfully, i.e. those which survived within the language of socialism and in that even became productive. The rhetorical devices I am talking about can be classified into three groups: a)

allegories, parables, personifications mainly to serve selfpresentation and introduction of new ideas; b) folklorisms, similes, metaphors and metonyms to illustrate or symbolize the enemy; c) repetition on both phonetic and lexical levels. Repetition can take the form of pure tautologies, and lists of three items, sometimes even four, to serve to consolidate and reaffirm recently conveyed knowledge. All three phenomena have several things in common: they represent didactic devices to convey knowledge; they serve its consolidation; they serve to affirm the correctness of the course taken; they result in syntactic expansion. As a consequence they make language appear persuasive rather than descriptive. I will shortly illustrate how they were applied, what traces they left in socialist discourse and how they became productive. It seems, however, appropriate to begin with a survey of the different categories of Bundist texts aimed at different target groups. Here one has to differentiate among three different kinds of press publications:

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

I)

Yiddish newspapers and pamphlets that were produced in Russia and functioned as a direct link between the central or local committee and the Jewish masses, i.e. publications directed to the ‘Within’ of the movement. I will be returning to these later. II) Publications produced outside Russia by the Bund Committee Abroad and directed to the periphery of the movement: literature that was to form a link between the Jewish workers and their desired confederates in the socialist revolution, the acculturated Russian speaking Jewish intellectuals on the one hand and the Russian Social Democrats and Polish Socialists on the other. III) The texts about the Bund for the Socialist International, consisting of: i) Brochures presented at congresses of European or global interest, ii) Press releases and appeals for donations, sent out to socialist movements and newspapers worldwide. I will concentrate here on the first category of texts, taken from the Yiddish publications produced in Russia and directed to the ‘Within’ of the movement, to the Jewish workers. Here again I differentiate among three groups of publications: I)

Newspapers produced by the Central Committee, as for example, the central organ Di arbeyter shtimme, and Der bund, a more popular organ that tried to move closer to the mass of the workers. Der bund was the response to a growing number of local publications that had started to deal with issues the Bund Central Committee had felt it should be covering itself. II) Apart from the Central and Foreign Committee publications there were those produced by the local committees. These local publications appeared only sporadically and had a rather small circulation. However, they provided information about events of ephemeral interest and reported local achievements, in contrast to the long, theoretical essays published by Di arbeyter shtimme and Der yidisher arbeyter. III) The third group comprises pamphlets and appeals issued in order to announce or comment on topical events. They represent the shortest link between leadership and workers, which is why many of the examples that follow are taken from those pamphlets and appeals. Their production had started well before the turn of the century, but there was a huge increase in their circulation after

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

19

1902. At the same time a stronger effort was made to produce pamphlets in Russian and Polish.16

I will now illustrate the three groups of rhetorical figures identified earlier. Allegories, personifications and parables borrowed from biblical discourse and European folklore lent an archaic air to many Yiddish newspaper texts. The following extract from an article published by Di hofnung on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Bund in October 1907 could be subordinated under the heading ‘Self-presentation’: The Jewish worker . . . his eyes were cast backwards to the past. The ‘Bund’ has turned him around, to face the future. And in the distant future it has shown him a shining star. A new nile, boundless mercy, a new world without tears and oppression. It has shown him socialism and said: Behold an objective one must strive towards, a holy objective, for which it is worth sacrificing one’s life. The Jewish worker had put his faith in God, in the Messiah, in Rothschild, he put his faith in all good and pious suffering, but never in his own strength. And the Bund said to him: Have faith in yourself! Your help is within you, within you and only you. Moreover it said to him: Your fight is your help! In the fight is a better life! In the fight is freedom from the despot’s yoke! Equality is in the fight! Your greatest joy, the temple of the future, you can only attain by the fight.17 The main purpose of the above self-presentation is to affirm the stability of the course the Bundist movement had already completed, and to indicate whither the course leads (without, however, giving ‘real’ information; one has to believe in it). This affirmation is additionally supported by providing moral rightness and truth expressed in many allegories; those alluding to biblical discourse such as sacrifice, mercy, God, Messiah, a holy objective, temple or nile (the final prayer of Yom Kippur), were transferred from Jewish religious traditions to the new secular ideas. Here is a synergism of language and culture, working to maintain and strengthen each other. By encoding familiar elements they convey a sense of familiar ground, self-confidence and trust, and no doubt also serve to allay the readers’ fear of the unknown future. The same purpose is also strived for most frequently by contrastive juxtaposition of brightness and darkness, where darkness stands for the past and brightness for the future: ‘a shvartse yiesh – a likhtike hofnung’18 (Dim

20

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

despair – bright hope); ‘light versus shade,’ combinations like ‘shadow of the past,’ ‘dark present,’ ‘bright future,’ or by sentences like ‘The united forces of the revolution will meet the dark, hellish forces of counterrevolution with force. . . . [A] life and death battle will be waged between the past and the future,’ 19 referring to the members of the reactionary classes who symbolize the past versus the progressive proletariat to whom the future belongs. Again the purpose of the description is to provide stability, and belief in the correctness of the way followed. The Bundist Yiddish source: ‘Our ideal is the bright ideal of the socialist system . . . destroy the dark ignorance around us,’20 found its way into Russian where it survived both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. On the one hand, this happened via the translating of Bundist material into Russian, mainly pamphlets released by the Bund Central or Foreign Committees after 1902, many of which were issued in Yiddish, Russian and Polish; on the other hand, by single Yiddish press articles which first appeared in the Bund central organs and later on were translated for the Bund Russian-language organs. As the 1905 revolution approached, an allegorical wrapping of the message can be seen more often in Bundist leaflets, their function mainly being to clear away the readers’ moral scruples to make way for the certain degree of violence required for the revolution, and to describe the application of terror as a means for obtaining social justice. In many cases such descriptions follow detailed illustrations of the enemy and its cruel activities, and convey the idea of revenge. The second group includes folklorisms, similes, metaphors and metonyms for the presentation of otherness. They mainly serve to illustrate or symbolize the enemy to be fought. In the following extract the ‘unconscious, less developed worker’ is warned against enemies from outside the movement, such as the counter-revolutionary or Czarist government: Bloodthirsty as a wolf and cunning as a fox is the counterrevolution. . . . The counter-revolution has the teeth of a wolf and the tail of a fox. . . . She outlaws gatherings, disperses meetings with lead and saber, forces the mouth of the press to close.21 The press release from which this passage originates has not only been translated from Yiddish (120 000 copies) into German but also into Russian (40 000 copies) and Polish (20 000 copies)22 with the consequence that bloodthirsty wolves and cunning foxes now feature in several languages.

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

21

Such animal metaphors can be found in the Sefer meshalim (known as the Kuhbukh – Cow Book), the most popular collection of Yiddish fables in Europe, first published in the late seventeenth century. Its thirty-four fables, featuring a cast of sly foxes, hungry wolves, and others, are principally derived from two traditions, that of Aesop, and that of the Arabic maqama literature, resting largely on Indian sources. Both were mediated through Jewish lines of transmission.23 In the Russian version of the quoted call to revolution it is, however, not certain whether a Russian native speaker would associate the symbols used in the Russian translation (which in fact belonged to the everyday language of the Jewish people) in the way they were meant to be understood, and hence act accordingly. Thus, to many a Russian reader, certain phrases must have sounded wooden or did not carry any message at all and were only perceived as expanded text; such a reader may have perceived the message intended in a different way and sometimes may not even have felt addressed at all. Much verbal decoration, which seems appropriate in the Yiddish original because of the reader’s background, proves to be redundant in both the Russian and German translations, since their potential readers neither have understanding of them as a part of their own social environment nor have they been introduced to the stock of symbols used. Metaphors of blight, illness and death are also used, intended to point out the instability, feebleness and decrepitude of the enemy: ‘the rotten buildings of the tyranny state’24 or ‘the Czarist despotism . . . rotten through and through – has lost its outward shine’25 or ‘A terrible storm now blows and rushes over all of Russia and drags and breaks the rotten buildings of the tyrant’s state.’26 As the examples demonstrate, many of these metaphors are coupled to parables. ‘the terrible storm of the revolution,’ or ‘the powerful waves of revolution,’ which had the aim of conveying that very little effort was necessary. There is only a little way further to go after such a long journey, just a few more obstacles to overcome. Retrospective views conveying this message play an important role in the Bundist press and any special occasion or anniversary is a welcome opportunity to review the long and stony road already traveled. The same idea is also conveyed when the above metaphors are combined with borrowings from earlier written sources, similar to those described under (a). The following example – ‘With a triple curse we must weave the shroud for the . . . rulers, for the company of crooks, for the whole of capitalism’27 – has a literary source, a line from Heinrich Heine’s 1844 poem ‘Die schlesischen Weber’: ‘Alt-Deutschland, wir

22

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

weben Dein Leichentuch. Wir weben hinein den dreifachen Fluch’28 (‘Old Germany, We weave your shroud. We weave in the triple curse’). The search for parallels in history or for similar events which have been commented on by literati or historians usually had an additional affirmative function: as an indicator for what is wrong or right – a convention, part and parcel of Jewish Diaspora existence, whose moral standards had to be transmitted and accepted with the help of a world of discourse alone rather than with the institutional help of a state such as other nations enjoyed. The final defamation of the enemy, also alluding to its feebleness, is formulated by metaphors conveying ideas like waste, dirt, scum, or detritus, as is evident in the following example (in which animal metaphors are also present). This is often applied to the so-called ‘masked enemies’ who cannot be recognized at sight. In this example the ‘unconscious, less developed workers’ are warned against enemies in their midst, referred to as provocateurs, spies and traitors: For two years now one of the humblest servants of the Czar has been applying all his powers to paralyze and destroy the workers’ movement in Russia . . .; for two years we have heard almost daily the cursed name Zubatov; for two years our towns have been . . . besieged by his spies, who like hungry wolves snatch our brother fighters from our midst and throw them into dark, dank prisons, . . . this scum of the earth.’29 One of the aforementioned examples containing the phrase ‘She outlaws gatherings, disperses meetings with lead and saber, forces the mouth of the press to close’30 includes yet another device that can be considered constitutive of Bundist discourse: the frequent use of metonymy, as in this case ‘with lead and saber’ where ‘lead’ replaces the term ‘rifle.’ In another example the term ‘rifle’ substitutes for the term ‘soldier,’ ‘nagaikes’ (sling whips) substitutes for ‘wild cossacks,’31 i.e., the enemy is replaced by using the terms for his tools; whereas the term ‘sword’ is mostly applied to figures on the writer’s own side: ‘With the sword of justice in the right hand, and the red flag in the left hand.’32 After 1917 such metonyms often functioned as a veil to cover or distract the public’s attention from the real intentions of a thing or institution. Who wouldn’t remember the famous phrase describing the Secret Police as the ‘shield and sword of the party,’33 probably going back to 1917, when in his first public speech as the head of the . recently founded ‘Tcheka’ Feliks Dzierzynski ´ frankly admitted: ‘Don’t

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

23

you believe that I’m concerned with the formalities of law. Now is not the time for the formalities of justice. What we need now is a no-holdsbarred fight. I request, I demand the creation of a revolutionary sword to annihilate all counter-revolutionaries.’34 This is a good example of the reflection in language of extralinguistic reality because it vividly demonstrates not only how the appearance of new things, concepts, qualities or activities is accompanied or quickly followed by changes in the lexical system35 but also how a new governing elite takes over symbols having a positive connotation which are already familiar to a lot of people, and applies them within the elite’s own moral scheme. The new governing elite now applies the ‘sword’ – which originally carried a certain moral value (justice) – in such a way as to serve its own, different, moral values. It symbolizes the vigilant tracking down of ‘enemies’ and ‘traitors’ who – influenced by the class enemy – lurk to destroy or damage the young Soviet state. Such metonyms remained part of socialist public discourse where they often sounded inappropriately bombastic or pompous, or too deeply emotionalized for the things to which they were applied. Repetition on both phonetic and lexical levels serves the consolidation and affirmation of newly conveyed knowledge. This is often achieved by the use of quasi-synonymous pairs, as illustrated in the following example: ‘Up to her neck in blood the counter-revolution goes on, sowing strife and hatred on her way and encouraging the animal instincts of humanity.’36 Such pairs are often coupled to an alliteration, as in ‘sowing strife and hatred’ (‘hader un has’) or ‘dark and dank’ (‘fintster un faykht’). They are pairings that are largely tautological or sequential. How popular these pairings were can be demonstrated by the following quotations, which all originate from a single ambiguous article: ‘best and most courageous battalions,’ ‘broad and versatile activity,’ ‘developed and mature consciousness,’ ‘wonder and delight,’ ‘healthy and fresh powers,’ ‘strong and successful fight,’ ‘nature and contents of our activity.’37 Such pairings may even be synonymous, as in ‘farfolgungen un redifes’38 or ‘genitkeyt un erfarung’39 or ‘nekome un rakhe!’40 where the first term is of Hebrew and the second of Germanic origin, or ‘unterdrikung un eksploatatsion’41 where the second term is of Romanic origin. There can be little doubt that all such pairings had a didactic purpose: the explanation by repetition, with other words, of information already given. A second such device is the listing of three, or even four items; the list device, however, at the same time tries to give some additional

24

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

evidence by supplementing with similar epithets or qualities of comparable importance, such as: ‘courageous, heroic and powerful’;42 ‘happy thoughts, high feelings, cheerful hopes; . . . strength, knowledge and happiness; . . . injustice, violence and slavery.’43 Both devices can appear in combination: throttle and suffocate, torment and torture, murder and strangle, shoot and kill.44 The listing of three has a clearly didactic value: most people find it easy to remember. The didactic purpose of tautologies is often augmented by alliteration, as in ‘hader un has.’ Apart from ‘repetitions’ on the lexical level, there are repetitions on the phonetic level, which serve the same purpose, but which were used primarily in oral rather than written Bundist discourse, as in ‘di fintstere melukhe fun blut un knut’ (the dark kingdom of blood and whip).45 These tautologies, sequences and listings of three or four items, possibly combined, lead to syntactic expansion. The affirmative character of such combinations can be observed increasingly after 1917 in many Russian texts which seem to be looking for justification of certain acts of a violent or dubious nature. With the increase after 1917 in activities that tended to require justification (persecutions of nonBolshevist parties, imprisonments, expulsion of the intelligentsia, and later purges) such devices were not only used more often, but also in a more extreme way, as a result of activities taking on a more extreme character: they were now becoming productive. An epitomy is the appearance of two successive quasi-synonymous adjectives in their superlative forms, as, for example, in the phrase ‘strashneishchaia i uzhasneishchaia stranitsa nashei istorii’ (the most terrible and most frightening page of our history). People familiar with Soviet Pravda reporting will be able to recall many more examples. This combination of lexical, grammatical and stylistic intensification leading to (a) linguistic extremes, and (b) a further syntactical expansion, can be observed quite early in Soviet Russian public discourse and has been described as newspeak.46 The taste for such linguistic extremes also penetrated communist newspapers in the Eastern Bloc countries after 1945; it even survived the political changes of 1989 and became a characteristic feature of post-communist discourse.47 The transfer and absorption of Jewish didactic concepts into the Russian language can be explained by an increase in the size of the contact zones between Russian- and Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries. Several phenomena contributed to this tendency: the stronger efforts made after 1902 to issue Russian propaganda material; the fact that within East European Jewish society the vernacular began to be

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

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replaced by optional languages;48 firmer centralization; and promotion of ‘more conscious’ workers and professional revolutionaries (many of whom spoke and/or wrote both Yiddish and a non-Jewish language) to leading positions.49

Was the language of Jewish revolutionaries writing in Yiddish influenced by that of non-Jewish revolutionaries? It was indeed, but mainly when it came to the naming of new things, qualities, institutions, or phenomena. I have been interested in the opposite process, and in this chapter I have examined in what way other languages, in particular Russian, were influenced by the writings of Bundist Jewish revolutionaries. Naming things was one thing, explaining Marxist revolutionary concepts to the masses, often little educated, another. And this is where the Bundist press had a pioneering role, as ‘a veg-vayzer,’ ‘a moyre derekh’ (which can be translated into English as ‘guide’ or into German as ‘Leitfaden’) committed to an enlightening and didactic mission: to explain, to clarify, and to lead the reader in the ‘right’ direction. The didactic concepts applied by the Bund (originally introduced by a Jewish national intelligentsia brought up in the traditional Jewish way) to teach the Jewish workers Marxism, together with the Bund’s organizational structures, in spite of the hindrance imposed by their illegality, turned out to be very successful. With the widening of contact zones between Yiddish- and Russianspeaking revolutionaries and their intensification over certain periods, Jewish organizational structures and Jewish didactic concepts were copied by other revolutionary organizations in Russia. They can be observed to have been fitted into the schemes of justice of the new governing elites in post-revolutionary Russia. However, the luggage often traveled empty, leaving the original contents or symbolism behind in the past.

Notes 1. T. M. Kopelzon, ‘Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie kontsa 80-kh i nachala 90-kh godov. Stenogramma vospominanii, chitannykh na zasedaniiakh sektsii 16 fevralia i 9 marta 1928 g.,’ in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev, ed. S. Dimanshtein (Moscow, 1930), pp. 65–80.

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

2. S. Gozshanski, ‘Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie nachala 90-kh godov. Stenogramma vospominanii, zachitannykh na zasedaniiakh sektsii 5 i 20 ianvaria 1928 g.,’ in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev, op. cit., pp. 81–93. 3. ‘Fun der redaktsie,’ Der yidisher arbeyter, 1 (December 1896), 1. 4. M. N. Dushkan,‘Minskaia konferentsiia 1895 goda,’ in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev, op. cit., pp. 238–43. 5. W. Holly, ‘Sprachhandeln ohne Kooperation? über den “kooperativen” Balanceakt beim Manipulieren,’ in Kommunikation und Kooperation, ed. F. Liedtke and R. M. Keller (Tübingen, 1987), pp. 137–57. 6. A. M. Grinberg, Pervaia legal’naia bol’shevistskaia gazeta ‘Novaia Zhizn’ 1905 g. Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskikh nauk (Alma Ata, 1951), p. 1. 7. V. I. Lenin, ‘Partinnaia organizatsiia i partinnaia literatura,’ Novaia Zhizn, November 13, 1905. 8. A. Kremer, ‘Di grindung fun bund,’ Arkadi, abshatsungen un zikhroynes vegn arkadin (Vilna, 1939), pp. 356–7. 9. A. M. Selishchev, Iazyk revoluitsionnoi epokhi (Moscow, 1928), pp. 44–5; A. P. Barannikov, Iz nabliudenii nad razvitiem russkogo iazyka v poslednie gody voiny. Uchennye zapiski Samarskogo universiteta: vypusk II (1919), pp. 64–84. 10. A. Mazon, Lexique de la guerre et de la révolution en Russie (1914–1918), (Paris, 1920); S. I. Karchevskij, Iazyk, voina i revolyutsiia (Berlin, 1923). 11. B. Comrie and G. Stone, The Russian Language since the Revolution (Oxford, 1978), pp. 131–2. 12. D. Weiss, ‘Was ist neu am “newspeak”? Reflexionen zur Sprache der Politik in der Sowjetunion,’ Slawistische Linguistik, 200 (1986), 247–321. 13. Comrie and Stone, The Russian Language, op. cit., pp. 132–4. 14. ‘Fun der redaktsie,’ Der yidisher arbeyter, 1 (December 1896), 1. 15. Bund-Auslandskomitee, Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes in Litauen, Polen und Rußland (‘Bund‘) nach seinem V. Parteitag, Bericht für den Internationalen Sozialistischen Kongreß in Amsterdam 1904, pp. 13–15. 16. Tsu ale vilner yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen!, Vilna, February 1902. 17. ‘Der 25-ter september 1897–1907,’ Di hofnung, September 24 [October 8], 1907, 2. 18. ‘Di klasn-politik funem bund un di natsionale politik fun di dergraykher. An entfer hern Dubno,’ Der veker, January 13 [26], 1906, 4. 19. ‘Revolutionsaufruf des Central Comites [sic] des Bundes: Der Vormarsch der Kontre-revolution [sic]. Übersetzt aus dem jüdischen Jargon,’ Arbeiterzeitung, February 3, 1906, 1 (orig. a press release of the Bund Central Committee, November 1905). 20. Khaverim arbeyter!, Vilna, May 1902. 21. Der Vormarsch der Kontre-revolution (orig. a press release of the Bund Central Committee), Vilna, November 1905. 22. Kontr-revoliutsiia idet!, Vilna, November 1905. 23. R. M. Wallich, Book of Fables: The Yiddish Fable Collection of Reb Moshe Wallich, trans. and ed. Eli Katz (Detroit, 1994), p. 10. 24. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, February 1902. 25. Der ershter mai, Vilna, April 1905.

Bundist Press during the Russian Period

27

26. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, February 1902. 27. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, April 1903. 28. H. Heine, Die schlesischen Weber, Ausgewählte Werke, II (Berlin, 1974), p. 300. 29. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, August 1900. 30. Der Vormarsch der Kontre-revolution (orig. press release of the Bund Central Committee), Vilna, November 1905. 31. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, February 1902. 32. Der ershter mai, Vilna, April 1905. 33. A. Waksberg, Die Verfolgten Stalins. Aus den Verliesen des KGB (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993), p. 11. 34. N. N. Kozlova, Ot avtoritatizma k totalitarizmu: mechanizmy perechoda (Moscow, 1989), p. 223. 35. Comrie and Stone, The Russian Language, op. cit., pp. 132–4. 36. Der Vormarsch der Kontre-revolution (orig. press release of the Bund Central Committee), Vilna, November 1905. 37. Vegn dem oystrit funem bund fun der ruslander sotsial-demokratisher arbeyterpartay, Vilna, December 1903. 38. Tsu ale vilner prikazchikes un prikazchitses!, Vilna, February 1902. 39. Vegn dem oystrit funem bund fun der ruslander sotsial-demokratisher arbeyterpartay, Vilna, December 1903. 40. Tsu alle yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen!, Vilna, May 1902. 41. Khaverim arbeyter!, Vilna, May 1902. 42. Oyfruf tsum 1-ten mai tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, April 1899. 43. Ibid. 44. Tsu ale yidishe arbeyter un arbeyterinen, Vilna, February 1902. 45. Ibid. 46. D. Weiss, ‘Was ist neu am “Newspeak”?,’ op. cit., pp. 247–321. 47. S. Marten-Finnis, ‘Leerstellen und Störstellen. Der postkommunistische Diskurs in Mitteleuropa,’ in Fahnenwörter der Politik. Kontinuitäten und Brüche, ed. O. Panagl (Vienna, 1998), pp. 139–49. 48. I. Bartal, ‘Eastern European Jewish Society as a Multi-lingual Polysystem,’ Paper given at the Sixth Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference of Jewish Studies, SEFER (February 2, 1999) in Moscow. 49. Tsum vilner yidishen organizirten proletariat: Vos fir a formen fun organizatsion?, Vilna, August 1903.

3 The Influence of the ‘Polish Question’ on the Bund’s National Program, 1897–1905 Joshua D. Zimmerman

Only then, when absolutism in Russia is overthrown, will the freedom of Poland be possible. Bund (1903) The history of the Bund in Czarist Russia has received considerable scholarly attention since the Second World War. Both party histories and academic studies have focused on the evolution of the Bund’s national program set against its struggle with the RSDRP.1 Little research, however, has been conducted on the Bund’s attitude to the ‘Polish question’2 in the pre-First World War period, or to its relations with the PPS, with which the Bund fought a bitter struggle over the right to organizational and programmatic independence.3 The decidedly Russian orientation of the pre-First World War Bundist leadership has obscured the fact that Jewish workers in Czarist Russia lived to the west of the Russian ethnic frontier and consequently had little or no contact with either Russian workers or Russian culture. In the industrial pockets of the Warsaw and Lodz provinces, the Jewish worker operated in a decidedly Polish cultural milieu, while Vilna, the Bund’s birthplace, was a prominent center of Polish cultural life throughout the nineteenth century, and a city in which Poles made up a third of the population.4 Outside Vilna, Poles and Russians constituted small minorities within the Pale amidst a largely Belorussian- and Ukrainianspeaking peasantry. Bundists active at the beginning of the century placed great importance on their dispute with the PPS, and on the influence of the PPS platform on the development of a national program within the Jewish socialist camp. Following the Bund’s 28

Influence of the ‘Polish Question’, 1897–1905

29

dramatic withdrawal from the RSDRP in 1903, Mark Liber characterized the conflict with Russian socialists as ‘the second page of our history.’ The first page, Liber said, was the Bund’s struggle with the PPS.5 In the following pages, I shall trace the evolution of the Bund‘s attitude to the Polish question and argue that the re-emergence, in the 1890s, of the independence movement among Catholic and Jewish Poles in the Pale played a significant role in the crystalization of the Bund’s national program.

Jewish socialists and the Polish question, 1893–7 In the beginning of the 1890s, before the Bund was formed, patriotic Polish socialists voiced grave concern about the political and cultural orientation of the socialist movement among the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in Vilna. First, they accused Russian-Jewish socialists of failing to address the nationalities question in Polish lands, and of promoting Russification by encouraging Jewish workers to embrace the Russian language and culture. Secondly, they accused Jewish socialists of indifference to Polish national aspirations. The Jewish social democrats responded unapologetically that a social democratic program could not include a demand for Polish independence, but gave no further explanation. The PPS, which was established in 1892 and called for social emancipation and Polish independence, sought to unify all socialists in Congress Poland and the Western Provinces under a common banner. But the Jewish social democrats, themselves products of Russian higher education and the Russian populist tradition, had no intention of severing their hallowed ties to Russian Marxist groups. Indeed, the Jewish social democrats aimed to prepare the Jewish worker for entry into an Empire-wide Russian revolutionary movement. Moreover, they were natives of Lithuania, where Polish cultural influence had long been in decline and where the modernizing elite saw Russian as the path to high culture. The PPS thus undertook the formidable task of attempting to infuse the Jewish center in Vilna with a ‘Polish’ orientation. Indeed, when, in 1893, the Polish socialist leader Stanis´law Mendelson came to Vilna to form a PPS center, he persuaded the young Józef Pi´l sudski, a leader of the local group of Polish socialists in Vilna, that winning over the RussianJewish socialist intelligentsia to the PPS program was a key task. Thereafter, in an attempt to counter Russian cultural influence, Pi´l sudski publicly and privately pressured the Jewish social democrats to switch to Yiddish as the language of agitation.6 Although the Vilna center, with

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Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100

PPS aid, began a shift to Yiddish in 1893–4, Pilsudski expressed ´ disappointment at the Bundist leadership’s hesitancy to adopt Yiddish.7 The dispute between the two organizations intensified in the period 1895–7, when the Vilna Group sent trained agitators to Warsaw to spread the movement into the Polish heartland. From the summer of 1895, when John Mill arrived in Warsaw to form a new Jewish socialist center, the Vilna Group sent more trained agitators to assist in the new Polish division. With the establishment of a Lithuanian-Jewish center in Warsaw, the proto-Bundists were again confronted with PPS pressures. This time, however, leaders of the PPS’s Jewish section, composed of exyeshiva students who embraced Polish as the path to high culture, urged the Jewish social democrats to support the struggle for Polish independence. After compromises were made on both sides, PPS Jews and Jewish social democrats even formed an alliance in January 1897 under the name, ‘The Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland.’8 But this litvak–poylisher alliance fell apart shortly after the establishment of the group, with Polish Jews accusing their Lithuanian partners of indifference to Polish concerns. The defection of PPS Jews highlighted the fact that LithuanianJewish socialists could no longer simply ignore Polish national concerns.

The establishment and ideological evolution of the Bund, 1897–1901 With the establishment of the independent Jewish Workers’ Bund in October 1897, the dispute between patriotic Polish socialists and Jewish social democrats became more acute. At the Bund’s founding congress, attended by thirteen Lithuanian-Jewish intellectuals and workers with little or no interest in Polish issues, Aleksandr Kremer delivered a speech outlining programmatic and organizational themes. The new Jewish organization would aim not only for the general goal of overthrowing absolutism in Russia, he proclaimed, but ‘will also have the special task of defending the particular interests of Jewish workers, conducting a struggle for their civil rights, and, above all, waging a campaign against anti-Jewish legislation.’9 To achieve these general and particular aims, the Bund would become ‘an autonomous organization’ within a future Russian social democratic party, having full independence on issues relating to the Jewish working class.10 After the Bund’s founding Congress, the PPS publicly demanded an answer from the new Jewish party on the Polish question. At the PPS’s Fourth Congress in November 1897, it condemned the Bund for ‘separating’ itself from the Polish and Lithuanian working classes,

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characterizing the ‘organizational and programmatic separateness’ of the new Jewish party as ‘harmful’ to the Polish movement. The resolution concluded with harsh words, accusing the Bund of ‘renouncing solidarity with the Polish and Lithuanian working class in the struggle for liberation from Czarist occupation.’11 Attacks in the PPS press continued through the first half of 1898, deeply disturbing the Bund’s Central Committee members Kremer and Kossovsky. Revealing its continued disinterest in national questions, the Central Committee confined its official response to the question of organizational separateness, characterizing the PPS position as an attack on the very existence of the Bund. The response came in the form of two Central Committee publications, one outlining the Bund’s program and the other a polemic against the PPS, provocatively entitled The War of the Polish Socialist Party against the Jewish Workers’ Bund. The programmatic statement, Our Aims, included a report of the founding of the RSDRP in 1898, which the Bund had joined, and a discussion of PPS accusations. Significantly, the title pages bore the emblem of the RSDRP with the Bund’s name at the bottom, making them official RSDRP publications. Our Aims used the Bund’s autonomy within the RSDRP as a weapon against the PPS. Emboldened by its newfound legitimacy, the authors attempted to expose the PPS’s alleged chauvinism. The central message of the piece was that only a Jewish workers’ organization could tend to the special needs of the Jewish worker.12 The Central Committee’s statement of aims defended the Bund’s right to exist, but it ignored altogether the question of Polish independence. In contrast to Our Aims, which sought to sell the Bund platform to Polish and Russian skeptics, as well as to the rank-and-file Jewish worker whom the PPS was trying to recruit, the second publication, written by Kossovsky, lashed out against the PPS in biting language.13 Constituting the Bund’s first sustained response to a half-decade of PPS accusations against Jewish socialists, Kossovsky challenged three PPS claims: (1) that the Bund had cut itself off from the Polish and Lithuanian working class by creating a separate organization; (2) that the Bund had formulated aims ‘separate’ from those of Christian workers; and (3) that the Bund furthered the Czarist politics of Russification.

The Bund’s Foreign Committee in Geneva and the national question, 1899–1901 The bitter struggle for organizational independence inside the Russian Empire led Bundists abroad to search for a comprehensive answer to

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the PPS. By 1899, it had become clear that PPS attacks on the right of Jews to their own workers’ party derived from the assumption, almost universal at the time, that the Jews did not constitute a nationality. Indeed, at its Fourth Congress in the fall of 1897, the PPS had declared its support for the right of all ‘nationalities’ in Lithuania to organizational separateness, but explicitly excluded two groups from that definition: the Polish-speaking Lithuanian intelligentsia and the Jews.14 Bundists abroad then responded with the provocative theory of extraterritorial Jewish nationality. This third stage in the evolution of the Bundist position on the Polish question (1899–1901) was linked to the crystalization of a national program within the Bund. It also saw the first theoretical formulation on the Polish question among Bundists. This ideological breakthrough on the national question was connected with the figure of John Mill, head of the Bund’s Foreign Committee in Geneva between 1898 and 1901, and editor of its theoretical organ, Der yidisher arbeyter. With Mill as editor, Der yidisher arbeyter increasingly focused on ideological issues. At the time, Mill fell under the influence of the national idea then being debated in German and Austrian socialist circles. From 1899, the pages of Der yidisher arbeyter were dominated by articles linking the nationality debate in central Europe to the situation of East European Jewry. Meanwhile, the PPS had begun to compete for the allegiance of Jewish workers with the dissemination of their first Yiddish organ, in 1898, Der arbeyter, which propagated the idea that socialism and Jewish emancipation could only be achieved under a Polish democratic republic.15 Mill responded to Der arbeyter in the organ of the Bund’s Foreign Committee, Der yidisher arbeyter, which he himself edited. In an article on the new PPS Yiddish organ, Mill castigated PPS Jews for their faith that the restoration of a Polish state would bring about full Jewish emancipation. From both a socialist and Jewish point of view, he maintained, Polish independence had to be subordinated to more pressing issues relevant to all workers in Russia. Yes, independence would alleviate the oppression of Poles, but a democratic Polish republic would not necessarily protect Jews against legal discrimination. Mill took care, however, to emphasize that the Bund was not in principle opposed to Polish independence, and even declared that ‘no true socialist’ could be against the right of Poles to national sovereignty. The problem was one of stages. The Bund supported an Empire-wide constitutional solution that would precede all attempts to resolve territorial disputes. In sum, the overthrow of absolutism had to

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be every socialist’s primary goal. Secondly, echoing the Bund’s polemic against the Zionists, Mill maintained that the struggle for Polish independence under current conditions was a utopian fantasy. By what means, Mill asked, did the PPS expect to separate from the powerful Russian state? Insurrection? War? Clearly, a Polish armed uprising was doomed to utter failure.16 Thirdly, why should Jews support Polish independence, Mill queried, given that they had no assurance a Polish state would bring them full emancipation?17 For Jews, then, a different solution had to be sought. Mill invoked the model proposed by the Marxist leader Karl Kautsky who had argued for the preservation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through a system of national self-determination.18 Applying Kautsky’s purported analysis to the Russian Empire, Mill argued that only a non-territorial answer to the national question could be employed in multinational states. ‘Not only Poles live in [Russian Poland],’ Mill wrote, ‘but also Jews, Germans, Lithuanians, and Belarussians. If Poland was separated from Russia, power would be in the hands of the Poles, and it would be highly unlikely if Jews, Germans and others would obtain national rights.’ He concluded with the Bund’s soundest argument yet against the PPS program. In a statement that would form the kernel of the future program of national cultural autonomy, Mill concluded that the solution to national oppression in Russia ‘is not the separation or federation of countries, but only the autonomy of nations: each nation shall have equal rights in all matters. . . . There can be no other national program for socialists.’19 Mill’s article revealed the degree to which Polish pressures had forced Bundists to formulate a response to the national question. Mill later recalled that the PPS–Bund polemic over the national question had forced him to reconsider the Bund’s party platform. In the concept of Jewish nationality, the Bund’s Foreign Committee found a powerful rhetorical weapon with which to fight the PPS. ‘Why does the PPS and its organ, Przeds´wit, struggle against the Bund?’ asked Der yidisher arbeyter in the summer of 1899. ‘Why is that which is good for the Polish proletariat bad and harmful for the Jewish worker?’ The answer, Der yidisher arbeyter maintained, was clear. To the PPS, there is no Jewish nation, and there is no Jewish proletariat: there are only Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian workers of the Hebrew faith, and thus no separate Jewish interests. Such a view is very, very naive.20

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The historic declaration: the Fourth Congress of the Bund The penetration of the national idea into the Jewish socialist camp led to the historic Party Congress in April 1901, when twenty-four delegates met in Bialystok to convene the Bund’s Fourth Congress. Combining Kautsky’s position on the national question with the theory of extraterritorial nationality, the Bund concluded the following: The Congress recognizes that a state such as Russia, which is made up of many different nations, will in the future be transformed into a federation of nationalities, and that each will have full autonomy independent of the territory in which it resides. [emphasis added] The congress maintains the term ‘nationality’ should also apply to the Jewish people [Der tsuzamenfor halt, az dem bagrif natsyionalitet darf men onvendn oykh oyfn yidishn folk].21 Although the Bund did not pass a resolution on the Polish question, its subsequently published congress report, which appeared as separate Yiddish, Polish and Russian publications, revealed the party’s preoccupation with the issue. The congress report went further than previous Bundist arguments, which had maintained that the breakup of Russia into national states would only create new oppressed minorities (an argument, incidentally, that came from Kautsky’s position on Austria–Hungary). For the first time, the Bund openly challenged Poland’s claim to historic rights. If Poland was to achieve statehood, the report questioned, would it base its borders on the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth-century? ‘It can be charged . . . that we recognize the present borders as an unalterable fact. In essence, [the Empire] was created by the help of fire and sword, swindle and the gallows,’ the report stated. ‘But were the so-called “historic” provinces of Poland . . . formed any differently?’ The congress continued: We, social democrats, are generally not concerned with the state, and it is not our intention to alter its borders and carve out new ones. We are for total freedom and equality. With regard to national equality, its only guarantee is to be sought in national autonomy, not in territorial independence.22

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To the PPS leadership, this statement of neutrality on the question of the state reflected the Bund’s political immaturity. In its official response to the Bund’s Fourth Congress, penned by the assimilated Jew Feliks Perl, the PPS derided the Bund for attempting to import into the Russian Empire a theoretical model for solving the national question in Austria–Hungary. Under the Bund’s plan, Perl alleged, the nationalities of the Western Provinces and Congress Poland would be coerced into a federation ruled from Moscow. ‘Unlike the Bund, we will not force anyone into a federation,’ Perl wrote. ‘We fully recognize the right of other nations to [either] an independent state or a voluntary union with Poland. The Bund’s federation,’ he continued, ‘is not only impossible, but even if it were possible, it would be a forced union.’23 In an effort to formulate a theoretical justification for its refusal to support Polish independence, Perl continued, the Bund resorted to intellectual ‘acrobatics’ and ‘prevarications.’ How did the Bund arrive at such a position? Perl’s answer is revealing: It derives from the Bund’s original sin – its All-Russian orientation. In the country in which it is active – in Lithuania and Poland – the Bund has separated itself from the local population, shares neither its aspirations nor understands its interests, and does not sympathize with the exceptional predicament in which these subjugated people find themselves.24 The PPS continued to characterize the Bund as hostile to Polish concerns, following the Fourth Congress of the Bund. The Bund responded to this characterization in an article in 1902. The 30th issue of Di arbeyter shtimme, which had heretofore avoided ideological and national issues, printed a lengthy sixteen-column polemic in which it condemned the PPS for incessant assaults.25 In arguments founded on the Bund’s traditional internationalism and increasingly strong national views, the Bund castigated the PPS for failing to recognize its right to organizational and programmatic independence. Why was it, the Bund asked, that of all the socialist groups in Russia, only the PPS greeted the formation of the Bund with hostility? Di arbeyter shtimme called on the PPS to recognize the Bund as the sole representative of Jewish workers.26 The Bund also used its friendly relations with other Polish and Lithuanian socialist parties to bolster its own position. What about the SDKPiL, which favored a Russian constitution and autonomy for Congress Poland, but did not demand independence? And the PPS

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Proletariat, which believed the demand for Polish independence had to be suspended until after liberal constitutional government was achieved in Russia? Or the Lithuanian Social Democrats, who favored a federal union with Poland and Russia? These three parties were in favor of close cooperation with the Russian Social Democrats, and believed national demands could only be addressed after a general social and political revolution. Most importantly, these three rival socialist parties all recognized the right of the Bund to represent Jewish workers. Given the existence of rival socialist parties in Congress Poland and Lithuania who opposed the PPS program, there appeared to be three different Polish and Lithuanian working classes. ‘Each of these [parties],’ Di arbeyter shtimme stated, claims that it alone correctly expresses the wishes and aspirations of the Polish and Lithuanian proletariat; that only its banner [expresses] the general [will] of the whole proletariat. We therefore ask the PPS: if we have no right to put forth our own demands, if we are prohibited from fighting under our own banner, if we must only take part in ‘the general struggle under a common banner’, then with which of the Polish and Lithuanian parties should we fuse? Under which ‘common’ banner shall we fight?27 The answer, Di arbeyter shtimme continued, was clear. As a party of the Jewish working class, the Bund could not fuse with any of the Polish or Lithuanian parties, as the PPS had been demanding: The Jewish working class is not only ‘a part’ of the Polish–Lithuanian proletariat. As with the proletariat of each nation, so [the Bund] is also an independent party of the universal proletariat; a party which possesses its own historical form, and which must advance the general socialist ideal in its own distinct way. In its class struggle, the Jewish proletariat has certain obstacles not shared by the proletariat of other nations: only the Jewish proletariat alone can struggle [against them], and in this sense it possesses its own historical aims and tasks. To realize them, the Jewish proletariat must build a separate revolutionary organization, an independent revolutionary force. The Central Committee’s polemic with the PPS demonstrated the degree to which the national idea had won over the Bund’s Central Committee since 1897. Whereas in the spring of 1901, the Central

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Committee only hesitatingly adopted a resolution recognizing the Jews as a ‘nationality,’ in the following year, the Bund’s Central Committee began to use the idea of Jewish nationality as a rhetorical tool in its polemic with the PPS, referring to the Jews as a full-fledged ‘nation’ equal to all others. Di arbeyter shtimme thus declared that the PPS’s ‘huge mistake’ was to believe that it could lead the struggle of the Jewish workers, ‘the proletariat of a foreign nation to which [the PPS] does not belong.’28 With the Bund’s increasing national orientation, the PPS–Bund polemic reached a new stage. Beyond tactical and organizational objections to PPS demands on the Jewish proletariat, Di arbeyter shtimme claimed that the working class of each nation ‘has its own psychology derived from a shared past; its own traditions and customs, its own national goals.’ The particular characteristics of each nationality played a role in determining a minimum program. Each party that desired to work among Jewish workers, or any other national group, Di arbeyter shtimme claimed, would have to instinctively adapt to those particular conditions in its agitation. Agitating among the working class of a particular nation ‘is possible only for the party which belongs to that proletariat, whose struggle it will lead. That party itself must have grown out of the proletariat, must be permeated with its ideals and understand its psychology. Needless to say, this would be impossible for a party from someone else’s nation.’ In its polemic with the PPS, the Bund suggested that in ethnically mixed areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, socialist parties could not represent a given territory, as the PPS claimed, but could only organize workers of one nationality. To claim exclusive control over workers in a given territory on the basis of so-called ‘historic rights,’ the Bund suggested, was nothing less than chauvinism. As Di arbeyter shtimme stated: ‘In the best case, the PPS can only be a national Polish party. That is, a party which can respond to the needs of the Polish proletariat, and among it lead socialist propaganda.’29 In the article’s final section, the Bund demonstrated its full agreement with the Russian Social Democrats, who described social revolution as a necessary precursor to resolving territorial disputes. Both the RSDRP and the Bund favored the unification of all revolutionary groups of every nation in order to form one united anti-Czarist front. The Bund then repeated its view that it supported the PPS program as a long-term, post-revolutionary aim, but not as part of a socialist party’s minimum program: political freedom had to be achieved before national liberation:

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The freedom of Poland is possible only when absolutism in Russia is overthrown. Only then, when Russia is a free country, when the proletariat of all nations are in a position to express their own ideals and aspirations, will the realization of the national goals of the proletariat of all nations in the Russian state be truly possible.

The Bund and the Polish question during the 1905 revolution In the period 1902–5, the significant growth of socialist ideas among Jewish workers and the spread of Jewish national consciousness led to the final stage in the evolution of the Bund’s attitude to the Polish question. The 1905 revolution also led to major ideological and tactical splits within the PPS over differing positions on the proper response to the revived Russian revolutionary movement. The PPS’s left-wing faction, known as ‘the Young,’ declared its solidarity with the Russian movement and reformulated the party’s national demands. At the Seventh Congress of the PPS in March 1905, the left-wing faction passed a resolution that called for self-rule in Congress Poland, including the right to draft a separate constitution. Moreover, it linked this political aim to the success of the revolutionary movement in all parts of the Russian Empire. As the revolutionary upheaval in Russia led to growing divisions within the PPS over the national question, the Bund decided to debate the question of Polish independence and issue an official statement. The Bund’s position on the Polish question derived more legitimacy from the fact that the PPS itself had split into two camps, one favoring solidarity with the Empire-wide movement and a suspension of the pro-independence platform. The decision to make national cultural autonomy an official part of the Bund’s program came in October–November 1905, when the Central Committee summoned 30 delegates to Zurich to attend the party’s Sixth Congress. Discussions on the national question predominated at the congress. The main concern was whether to preserve or revise the Fourth Congress’s resolution of April 1901. Medem led off the debate with a speech in favor of the official inclusion of Jewish national cultural autonomy in the Bund’s program. The motion passed with 25 votes for, and four opposed.30 The official resolution called for the equality of all nationalities, which it defined in an extraterritorial manner, as well as written guarantees for the right of each nationality to free cultural development. ‘Seeing that Russia is inhabited by different peoples who are becoming more and more mixed

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together with the development of capitalism,’ the resolution stated, ‘ . . . the above-mentioned governmental–juridical arrangements can only be framed in an extra-territorial [manner]: in the form of national cultural autonomy.’31 The Bund’s solution to the national question in general and the Jewish question in particular thus consisted of three points: (1) full civil and political equality for Jews; (2) legislation guaranteeing the right of Jews to use their native language in courts and in all public institutions; and (3) national cultural autonomy.32 Meanwhile, the Bund still had not taken an official position on the Polish question since its establishment. In fact, shortly before the Sixth Congress report appeared, the Central Committee printed an article in the Warsaw-based monthly Der bund, outlining its position on the Polish question in the wake of the 1905 revolution. Der bund argued that under current conditions, the independence of Poland was unattainable. First, it was against the interests of both the bourgeoisie and the working class. Clearly, the middle classes were benefiting greatly from the growth of Polish industry under Russian rule. Similarly, the struggle for independence was contrary to the class interests of Polish workers. Even the PPS, the Bund maintained, was now seeing that social upheaval in Russia demanded the unification of all revolutionary groups in the struggle for the overthrow of autocracy. ‘The proletariat of Poland,’ it declared, ‘must therefore struggle together with the proletariat in all parts of Russia for the annihilation of Czarism and the formation of one democratic republic of Russia.’ Secondly, the independence of Poland was unattainable militarily. A Polish uprising would have no chance of defeating the combined forces of the partitioning powers. Only a war between the partitioning powers could bring about a restored Poland, and this, the Bund claimed, was ‘an impossible scenario.’ Because the restoration of Poland was an unrealizable goal under conditions existing in 1905, the Bund argued that Poles had to link their freedom to the advance of democracy in Russia. ‘A free Poland,’ Der bund stated, ‘is only possible in a free Russia.’33 The article nonetheless acknowledged that a future democratic Russia would have to grant the Polish Kingdom a degree of self-rule. Under the influence of the Bund’s Warsaw division, whose original Lithuanian leadership had been replaced, by 1905, with native PolishJewish intellectuals raised in Polonized households, Der bund came out in favor of ‘provincial self-government’ for Congress Poland. But because ‘the Poland question’ concerned all nationalities inhabiting

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Polish lands, the Bund went one step further. Territorial self-rule in Congress Poland had to be accompanied, it argued, by a legal guarantee for the right of non-Polish nationalities to freely develop their culture. ‘How can we be certain that schools will not be exclusively Polish in an autonomous Congress Poland?’ Der bund asked. ‘How can we be guaranteed that [Jews, Germans and Lithuanians] will have the free opportunity to develop their cultures?’ The answer was national cultural autonomy: In addition to territorial self-government, the proletariat must demand national-cultural autonomy guaranteeing each nation in Russia the freedom to develop its own culture and the opportunity to receive education in its own language.34 The Bund reminded its readers that Poles too would benefit from national cultural autonomy. For such a system would guarantee the right of Poles living outside Congress Poland to their own schools; that is, the right of free national cultural development. The Bund’s answer to the national question in general, and the ‘Poland question’ in particular, was thus threefold: (1) a democratic Russian state; (2) territorial self-government for Congress Poland; and (3) national cultural autonomy for minority nationalities.35 The Central Committee’s article in Der bund set the stage for the official resolution, which was passed at the Bund’s Sixth Congress in the fall of 1905. The congress delegates included members from the Central and Foreign committees and representatives from 18 cities inside the Empire, and was attended by such leading figures as Vladimir Kossovsky, John Mill, Shmuel Gozshanski, Vladimir Medem, and Mark Liber.36 Significantly, however, delegates from both the Warsaw branch, including Bronislav Groser, and the Polish Regional Committee, were not able to attend.37 Thus, at the very congress at which the Polish question was seriously discussed, representatives of the Bund’s Polish-Jewish intelligentsia, who had been the most sensitive to Polish concerns, were not present, and the debate on the Polish question was led by Russian-Jewish pioneers who had traditionally shown little interest in Polish affairs. Despite the absence of Polish Bundists, the Congress proceeded with the debate and, without a single opposing vote, came out against the demand for Polish independence. With 25 voting in favor and one abstention, the Congress passed the following resolution:

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The Sixth Congress of the Bund holds that the demand for the independence of Poland cannot be part of a social democratic program, and finds that agitating for such a goal can only divert the proletariat . . . obscure its class consciousness, and shatter the strength of the revolution.38 In addition, the Congress fell short of explicitly endorsing the PPS‘s demand for a constituent assembly in Warsaw. Instead, it adopted a general position in support of regional autonomy throughout the Russian Empire without a specific clause for Congress Poland. Vladimir Medem later recalled the Sixth Congress debate on Poland, writing that the majority of delegates believed that a separate constitution for Poland ‘would have been tantamount to a breaking of the revolutionary front and a splintering of forces.’39 For the line between a separate constitution for Poland and outright independence, the delegates concluded, was very thin. The Congress thus issued the statement that ‘the interest of the proletariat from Poland demands the transformation of the Russian state into a democratic system with wide territorial self-government (zelbstfarvaltung) and nationalcultural autonomy.’40 To many Polish Bundists, however, the party’s declaration on the Polish question had not gone far enough. Although the Warsaw Bund was in agreement on the question of Polish independence, it nonetheless supported the specific demand for Polish autonomy. In the pages of the Warsaw Bund’s Polish-language organ Nasze has´la, which first appeared in 1906, Groser put forth his position on the Polish question. While Congress Poland could not exist on its own from an economic point of view, Groser argued, the Poles nevertheless had a right to ‘administrative autonomy’ and a separate legislative Sejm (parliament) that would deliberate on all questions pertaining to local affairs. But these arrangements, he emphasized, would have to be accompanied by legal guarantees of ‘full equality for all nations in Poland with regard to use of one’s mother tongue in all civil service and state institutions.’41 The opportunity of the Warsaw Bund to put forth its position to the Lithuanian-dominated Central Committee came in the spring of 1906, when delegates met in Bern to convene the party’s Seventh Conference.42 Led by Groser, the Warsaw branch garnered support for a revised statement recognizing the demand for Polish autonomy. In a compromise between the litvak and poylisher positions, the Bund issued the following resolution, that would remain unchanged until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917: ‘[We] recognize that the

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position of the Bund’s Warsaw Committee, which interprets the Sixth Congress resolution on territorial self-government in terms of autonomy for Poland, does not violate the accepted Congress resolution.’43

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the Bund’s position on the Polish question developed gradually during the period under examination and was directly linked with the evolution of the Bund’s national program. The party’s leaders were Russian-Jewish intelligenty who came of age in the last third of the nineteenth century when Russification had begun to seriously undermine Polish cultural influence in Lithuania. This was well articulated by PPS activist Feliks Zaks, a Warsaw native who sat on the PPS’s Jewish Committee and edited its Yiddish organ, Der arbeyter. When Zaks moved to Vilna in the summer of 1902 to head the PPS’s Lithuanian and Jewish divisions, he commented on the vast gulf dividing the Polish and Lithuanian Jewish communities. ‘I don’t think the history of [Polish] insurrections can in some way exert influence,’ Zaks wrote. ‘Certainly not in Lithuania where Jews are not at all concerned with this “past.” It speaks neither to their heart nor to their intellect. Besides, the Polish Question is something foreign and very distant for Lithuanian Jews.’44 Distant from Polish political and cultural life, the Bund’s leadership came to the conclusion that the breakup of European Russia into national states would not benefit the Empire’s 5 200 000 Jewish inhabitants. Rather, they promoted a non-territorial solution to the national question in general, and the Jewish question in particular. In contrast to the Polish-Jewish educated elite, who linked Jewish emancipation to the restoration of a democratic Polish Republic, Bundists often expressed fear that a Polish state would deny full equality to Jews. This was articulated in a 1905 Polish-language pamphlet in which the Bund’s Central Committee warned Jews active in Polish political life that the Polish nation also included an anti-Semitic nationalist party whose influence was rapidly spreading among Polish workers, the lower middle class, and the conservative aristocracy. Who, they asked, is to say the nationalists would not control a Polish state and draft anti-Jewish decrees?45 In sum, the Bund developed a position that attempted to address Polish aspirations for self-rule while guaranteeing national cultural autonomy for the dispersed Jewish population in imperial Russia.

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Notes 1. See K. Pinson, ‘Arkady Kremer, Vladimir Medem and the Ideology of the Jewish Bund,’ Jewish Social Studies, VII (1945), 233–64; G. Aronson et al., Di geshikhte fun bund, 5 vols (New York, 1960–81); H. Shukman, ‘The Relations between the Jewish Bund and the RSDRP, 1897–1903’ (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1961); M. Mishkinsky, ‘Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia,’ Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, XIV (1969), 27–52; and H. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia from its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, 1972). 2. The term ‘the Polish question’ will be used throughout this chapter to refer to the dual problem of nineteenth-century Polish statelessness and the Russification of lands formerly under Polish rule. 3. Exceptions to this rule are the works of Moshe Mishkinsky, Jonathan Frankel, Robert Wistrich, and Jack Jacobs, which have examined the PPS’s influence on the development of the Bund’s national program up to 1901. But in all four works, references to the PPS and the Polish question conclude in 1901. They thus fail to elucidate the evolution of the Bund’s position in the period 1902–6. See M. Mishkinsky, Reshit tnuat ha-poalim ha-yehudit be-rusya (Tel Aviv, 1981); J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981); R. Wistrich, ‘Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and the Jewish Labor Movement, 1893–1903,’ in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. A. Rapoport-Albert and S. Zipperstein (London, 1988), pp. 529–45; and Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York: 1992). 4. For the nationalities in the makeup of Vilna in the late nineteenth century, see Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rosiiskoi Imperii 1897 g., bk 7 (St Petersburg, 1905), p. 1. 5. Cited in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, op. cit., p. 217. 6. See T. M. Kopelzon, ‘Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie kontsa 80-kh i nachala 90-kh godov,’ in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev, ed. S. Dimanshtein (Moscow, 1930), pp. 72–3; Pil´sudski, Pisma zbiorowe uzupel´ nienia, vol. II (Warsaw, 1993), pp. 92–3; and Pil´sudski, Pisma zbiorowe, vol. I, op. cit., pp. 25–9. 7. See Czasowy [Pil´sudski], ‘Wilno we wrzes´niu,’ Przeds´wit, 9 (September 1894), reprinted in Pil´sudski, Pisma, vol. I, op. cit., p. 63. 8. For information on the short-lived Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland, see J. Mill, ‘Di pionern-epokhe fun der yidisher arbeyter-bavegung,’ Historishe shriftn, vol. III, ed. E. Tscherikower [Tsherikover], A. Menes, F. Kursky [Kurski], and A. Rosin (Ben-Adir) [Rozin] (Vilna, 1939), p. 385; An alter bakanter [Y. Peysakhzon], ‘Der onfang fun der yidisher arbeyter bavegung in varshe (zikhroynes fun a idishen sotsialist),’ Der yidisher arbeyter (Geneva), 10 (1900), 33; P. Shvarts, ‘Di ershte yidishe oysgabes fun der p.p.s. (1895–98),’ Historishe shriftn, vol. III, op. cit., p. 530; I. Trunk, ‘Di onheybn fun der yidisher arbeter bavegung,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. I, ed. G. Aronson, S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], E. Nowogrudski [Novogrudski], Kh. Sh. . Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1960), p. 80; and H. Piasecki, Zydowska Organizacja PPS (Warsaw, 1978), p. 31.

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9. J. Mill, ‘Arkadi un der ershter tsuzamenfor,’ in Arkadi, zamlbukh tsum ondenk fun grinder fun ‘bund’ arkadi kremer (1865–1935) (New York, 1942), p. 164. 10. Ibid. 11. ‘Czwarty zjazd naszej partii,’ Robotnik, 26 (February 13, 1898), in Pil´sudski, Pisma, vol. I, op. cit., p. 201. 12. [Bund], Unzere tsiln (n.p., 1898), 15. 13. [Vladimir Kossovsky], Di milkhome fun der poylisher sotsyialistisher partay gegn dem yidishn arbeyter bund (n.p., July 1898). According to the editors of Arkadi, zamlbukh, Kossovsky’s brochure was published in Yiddish, Russian and Polish. However, neither the PPS nor the Bund Archives contain a Polish edition, nor is there any reference to one in the secondary literature. 14. See ‘Czwarty zjazd naszej partii,’ op. cit., in Pil´sudski, Pisma, vol. I, p. 201. 15. See Der arbeyter (London), 1 (Dec. 1898), 6. 16. Khayim [John Mill], ‘“Der arbeyter” numer 1,’ Der yidisher arbeyter, 6 (March 1899), 44–5. 17. Ibid., p. 45. 18. For a discussion of Kautsky’s position on the national question in general and the Jewish question in particular, see Jacobs, On Socialists, op. cit., pp. 5–43. 19. Khayim [John Mill], ‘“Der arbeyter,”’ op. cit., 46. 20. [John Mill], Der yidisher arbeyter, 7 (August 1899), 47. 21. ‘Der ferter kongres fun algemaynem idishen arbeyter-bund in rusland un poyln,’ Der yidisher arbeyter, 12 (1901), 99. . 22. Czwarty zjazd ogülnego Z ydowskiego zwiazku robotniczego na Litwie, w Polsce i ‘ Rosyi (London, 1901), p. 10. 23. [Feliks Perl], ‘Bund o niepodlegl´os´ci Polski,’ Robotnik (Warsaw), 41 (September 17, 1901), 1. 24. Ibid., 2. 25. [Mark Liber], ‘P.p.s. vegn der yidisher arbeyterbavegung,’ Di arbeyter shtimme, 30 (Oct. 1902), 1–8. Liber’s article was subsequently reprinted as a party brochure in both Polish and Russian translation. Feliks Zaks, editor of the PPS’s Yiddish organ and head of the PPS Jewish Organization, . responded to the Bund in his article, ‘Odpowiedz Bundowi’, Przeds´wit, 8 (August 1903), 313–28, which was reprinted in Yiddish as A klorer entfer (London, 1904). 26. ‘P.p.s. vegn der yidisher arbeyterbavegung,’ Di arbeyter shtimme, 30 (Oct. 1902), 1. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 6. 30. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Di ershte ruslender revolutsye,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. II, ed. G. Aronson, S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], E. Nowogrudski [Novogrudski], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (1962), p. 253. 31. ‘Fun partey-lebn: der VI tsuzamenfor fun algemaynem yidishn arbeyter bund in lite, poyln un rusland,’ Der veker (Vilna), 1 ( Jan. 3, 1906/ Dec. 25, 1905), 4. 32. Ibid.

Influence of the ‘Polish Question’, 1897–1905

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33. ‘Di poyln frage,’ Der bund (Warsaw), 11 ( December 1/ November 18, 1905), 4. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. Ibid. 36. Hertz, ‘Di ershte ruslender revolutsye,’ op. cit., p. 250; S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], ‘Bronislav groser,’ in Doyres bundistn, vol. I, ed. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts] (New York, 1956), p. 327. 37. Hertz, ‘Di ershte ruslender revolutsye’, op. cit., p. 250. The Polish Regional Committee was formed in February 1905 to represent local Bundist divisions in Congress Poland outside Warsaw and Lodz. 38. ‘Fun partey-lebn: der VI tsuzamenfor . . .,’ op. cit. 39. V. Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, ed. S. Portnoy (New York, 1979), pp. 350–1. 40. ‘Fun partey-lebn: der VI tsuzamenfor . . .,’ op. cit. 41. [B. Grosser], ‘Autonomja terytorjalna, a autonomja kulturalno-narodowos´ciowa,’ Nasze hasl ´ a (Warsaw), 1 (January 1906), 5–6; in the Sejm Library, Warsaw, microfilm division. 42. See Hertz, ‘Di ershte ruslender revolutsye,’ op. cit., pp. 342–6. 43. Quoted in ibid., pp. 345–6. 44. Archiwum Akt Nowych (Warsaw), sign. 305/VII/34, folder 1, fol. 60; Feliks Zaks, Vilna, to the PPS Foreign Committee, London, August 7, 1902. . 45. ‘Do Z ydowskiej inteligencyi!’ London, 1905, Central Committee of Bund, p. 6; in the Sejm Library, Warsaw, microfilm division, AM CA 2048.

4 Russian Bundists Abroad and in Exile, 1898–1925 Claudie Weill

According to a typology established in 1908, there were three kinds of Russian Social Democratic support groups abroad:1 (1) those consisting solely of workers; (2) those made up of students; and (3) those groups that were mixed. As we shall see, this typology also applies to the Bund. The first foreign groups supporting the Bund were formed shortly – less than one year – after the creation of the Party itself, along with the Foreign Committee. Joining a group was anything but an easy venture: These Bund groups abroad were intensely conspiratorial. Not only were persons on the outside unaware of who was a member of a group, but the very existence of the groups themselves remained a deep secret. And when someone was proposed for admission to the group he was asked: ‘Would you be willing to enter a Bund group if one were organized?’2 Furthermore, the members of the groups were not necessarily Party members since it was considered that the ‘real’ work of the Party had to be carried out in Russia itself. ‘[W]hat precisely did it mean to be a “Bundist” in Bern, in Switzerland, where there was no Jewish labor movement?’ asked Vladimir Medem. And in fact, in 1903 several comrades proposed that these groups should formally be recognized as party organizations. . . . [T]his was turned down with the explanation that the circles abroad were composed largely of individuals who were merely at the point of preparing to embark upon real party activity, and such activity could take place only in Russia proper, among the mass of Jewish workers. Accordingly, we found ourselves outside the actual ranks of the party.3 46

Russian Bundists in Exile, 1898–1925

47

This points to a double paradox: (1) A party which set extra-territorial autonomy on its agenda was actually putting emphasis on its anchorage to a territory, that of the Russian Empire. (2) Whereas propaganda among Jewish workers from Russia living abroad was left largely to selforganization, competitors, mainly the anarchists, were given fairly free rein. Consequently, it seems that particular stress was put on work among students: or did intellectuals in-the-making need a greater control? This latter aim is obvious in the formation of the United Organization of Workers’ Associations and Support Groups to the Bund Abroad in January 1902, which decided to emphasize working among the intelligentsia. According to H. Tobias, the students’ colonies abroad provided a ready field for such activity because ‘there were more students and intellectuals than workers in the colonies.’4 The question is whether there was any intentional division of labor between the home country and abroad, hence making the students and intellectuals in Western Europe more visible than the workers. There is perhaps another reason for that choice: the workers were probably going to stay in their host countries, whereas the students were more likely to return home. The importance of student associations abroad as recruiting fields for the Russian revolutionary parties – and, among them, the Bund – was stressed by Osip Piatnitsky, himself in charge of the practical organizational work for the RSDRP abroad (and for the Bolsheviks): Without the student organizations, support groups could not exist: organizing evenings, lectures, etc. legally was only possible under the banner of the Association of Russian Students. . . . In Germany, in Belgium and even in Switzerland, the students were the majority at that time. Indeed, these groups worked mainly among Russian students.5 The United Organization of Workers’ Associations and Support Groups to the Bund Abroad existed until the Revolution of 1917 when it was dissolved along with the Foreign Committee of the Bund and the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. At least eight gatherings were convened before 1913, more regularly than was the case for the split Russian Social Democracy abroad as a whole. Work among students remained a steady concern. In fact, in 1911 the Bund set guidelines concerning the burgeoning Russian-Jewish student associations abroad, testimony to a renewed social movement. It wanted to channel the increasing national consciousness of Jewish students. Nevertheless, to split the organizations along national lines was

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contradictory to the Bund’s internationalist stance. Since the so-called ‘non-partisan organizations’ were actually a combination of Seimists (i.e. members of the SERP), Poalei Zionists, Socialist Zionists and General Zionists, collaborating with them meant renouncing the Bund’s very essence. Thus, the Bund wished to strengthen its own circles and clubs, in order to attract the ‘non-partisan’ youth.6 By the end of 1913, at the eighth conference of the United Organization, noting the fading of the ‘hypnosis of nationalism’ and of apoliticism, the Bund changed its tactic and now advised its followers to take part in the non-partisan student associations in order to gain new support, and to struggle against both nationalism and assimilationism.7 At the same time greater emphasis was put on ‘Jewish cultural work,’ following the shift in orientation which the Bund had undergone since the revolution of 1905 towards an increasing implication in the nationalizing process of the Jewish working class. ‘[R]aising funds, publishing literature, preparing individuals for organizational work back home. . . forwarding money and literature (smuggled in by a thousand devices), and sending and receiving letters,’ such were, in Medem’s words, the duties of the groups, for which, of course, at least in Western Europe, students were supposed to have more leisure time than workers. ‘The literature was smuggled in either directly – in massive amounts via the German or Austrian frontiers – or through the mails in sealed envelopes. We made use of envelopes with addresses of different commercial firms. To avoid attracting the attention of the Russian postal censors . . . we used to distribute them to our groups in various foreign cities, from which they would be mailed into Russia,’8 according to a system also used by other Russian revolutionary parties. This was publicly revealed at the Königsberger trial in 1904, which was staged against German Social Democrats for the help they provided to the Russian ones in smuggling in people and literature through the German–Russian border.9 John Mill, for example, settled for a while in Berlin in order to get help for the Bund from the German Social Democrats and the Vorwärts network.10 Raising funds was one of the important tasks of activists abroad. Arkadi Kremer, Mark Liber and Raphael Abramovitch, for example, traveled to the United States for this purpose, even, in the case of Abramovitch, after the First World War, on behalf of the Mensheviks in exile. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, the stronger workers’ organization in the United States (Central Union of Bund Organizations in the USA) was able to provide the Party with funds,

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and to organize lecture tours. In Western Europe, it was largely among students that lectures and festivals helped to fulfill such a purpose. Geneva ‘was the center. . . for our. . . foreign groups, the network of which became more extensive from day to day as our apparatus gradually spread throughout the world. Numerous branches were established in America where they were united in a “Central League.” A series of groups emerged in South Africa. And we even maintained steady contact with Australia,’ recalls Medem.11 However, unlike the Poalei Zion, the Bund did not become a world party (which is the reason why Poalei Zion was refused admission into the Second International, which only recognized parties acting in the framework of a single state). This may also be one of the reasons why the Bund refused to consider the groups, and in particular the workers’ associations abroad, as belonging to the Party. At the sixth conference of the ‘United Organization,’19 groups abroad were represented, including nine in Germany (Berlin, Darmstadt, Friedberg/Hessen, Jena, Cöthen, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Mittweida, and Munich),12 all of which were cities with universities or institutes of technology. But there were actually more groups than the ones represented at the conference. For instance, a group still existed in Heidelberg in 1908, at a time when political activity was slowing down in general. Heidelberg was also a place where leading activists of all shades used to study, the Bundist Moyshe Olgin (Novomiski) for instance, who was there between 1907 and 1912.13 Another activist, Pavel Berman, shifted from Berlin to Darmstadt and Karlsruhe. In Halle too, there was a group of four members at the end of 1907,14 whereas no Bundists seem to have been in Dresden between 1904 and 1906.15 The main stronghold in Germany was without doubt Karlsruhe, where Medem and Trotsky had their first harsh confrontation in 1903, and which both visited several times on their lecture tours. The groups gathered to celebrate the Bund’s fifth anniversary, to protest against the pogrom in Kishinev, to listen to explanations on how the Bund left the RSDRP at the second congress of the Russian party, or to other speeches of traveling lecturers, among them mainly Medem.16 While taking part in organizing several evening balls in the foreign colonies, the Bund groups also collected funds on those occasions, for instance in Munich in 1905 and 1911, and in Heidelberg, the city with the oldest Russian reading hall in Western Europe.17 As an example of the close relationship between political and cultural activity, Bundist students also performed Dovid Pinski’s The Tsvi Family (on the pogrom in Kishinev) in 1905 in Berlin,18 where a Bund group had been created

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among Jewish cigar makers in 1898 with the support of Pavel Berman. Social democratic publications in Yiddish were found by the police at the Saltykov reading hall, an association of Russian students, in 1907.19 In Munich, the second biggest university city in Germany, workers’ songs were performed in Yiddish at the German Social Democratic summer festival in 1905. The Bund group took part in arranging balls and collecting funds on such occasions.20 In Leipzig, the group was also created rather early since Dovid Mitshnik, who later bequeathed part of his inheritance to the Bund, joined it in 1901.21 When Piatnitsky arrived in Leipzig in 1909, he could name the members of the group which still existed a year later and was part of a joint committee organized with Polish and Russian Social Democrats in order to keep a hold on the leadership of the local Russian student association.22 In Switzerland, the main group was the one in Bern, created in 1898. Medem belonged to it and recalled evenings of debates with Zionists and with Russian revolutionary factions as well as ‘small, closed discussion circles for our own people,’ with an increasing emphasis on the national question.23 Actually, if Medem was shaping his own theoretical positions at that time, it was also an important issue for all the groups supporting Russian Social Democracy abroad. In 1902, the group in Bern was assigned the task of setting up the central office of Bundist groups abroad, whereas Geneva was to harbor the Foreign Committee. In London, the Bundists seem to disappear behind the RussianJewish anarchists and their charismatic leader, Rudolf Rocker. The Social Democrats, slightly boosted by immigrant Bundists, remained a small esoteric group, more inward looking in their concern for maintaining doctrinal purity. . . . Their party paper, Die Neie Zeit, founded by another gentile, Beck, in 1904, struggled on as a weekly or fortnightly sheet until 1908. Many former Bundists who had worked with the Social Democrats in Russia and Poland soon took measure of the situation and transferred their allegiance to the more practical body [i.e. the anarchists].24 Nevertheless, there seems to have been a greater Bundist influence than assumed by William Fishman in the statement quoted above. For instance, there was a huge celebration of the Bund’s fifth anniversary in 1902,25 and the English socialists of the SDF supported the Bund’s protest actions against the pogrom in Kishinev.26 Between 1901 and

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1903, the Foreign Committee of the Bund settled in London – though it remains a question whether it did so in order to be apart from too active colonies, so as to preserve clandestinity, or to be in the midst of one of them for logistical support. The Second Congress of the RSDRP took place in that city, once again on ‘Bund territory’ (though Lenin was also living there). Furthermore, a support group of the RSDRP is mentioned in London in 1907, at a time when Russian Social Democracy was united and had convened another congress there. Another factor pointing to the influence of the Bund in London is the existence of the Workers’ Circle [Arbeter Ring] there. Workmen’s Circles were created throughout the world as Bundist associations of mutual aid. The one in London, created in 1903, had 814 members in 1912.27 We also know that a number of Bundists left London in 1917 to take part in the revolution in Russia. In Paris, where an Arbeter Ring was also created in February 1913, counting approximately 100 members, a Bund support group seems to have been created as early as 1898. There were perhaps two different groups: a workers’ group and one made up of intellectuals and students, which eventually merged into the Kempfer group in 1902. This organization celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1912.28 In spite of competition with the anarchists, as in London – Hersh Mendel, for instance, shifted his allegiance to the anarchists after he was rather coldly received (for the sake of conspiracy) by the Bundist Club on the rue Ferdinand Duval, near the rue des Rosiers (in the heart of the Pletzl)29 – the Bund actually exerted an influence on the Jewish labor movement in the Pletzl and beyond. Bundists advocated autonomy for the Jewish sections of the French trade union confederation, the CGT – as the Bund did on the political level in the RSDRP – fearing that otherwise the Jewish workers would be lost in the French labor movement. Exiles and immigrant workers remained apart from one another, though. The Jewish students were perhaps more eager to work with their other comrades from Russia.30 According to the police files, the Bund in Paris counted approximately 300 members in 1907.31 As mentioned above, the Bund’s Foreign Committee, created in December 1898, was from 1903 onwards the ‘official representative’ abroad and its ‘members were appointed by the Central Committee.’ Beginning in the fall of 1903 and until 1917, the Foreign Committee was located in Geneva, rue Carouge, and was henceforth known as the ‘Carougeke’. ‘It was the heart and nerve center of our whole organization abroad,’ in charge of publications (Poslednie izvestiia, Der yidisher arbeyter, Vestnik Bunda, Otkliki Bunda, etc.), of taking care of

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political émigrés and even of purchasing weapons for self-defense against pogroms in Russia. The Committee also provided the groups abroad with guidelines and with visiting lecturers, and used the latter, as we have seen, for sending literature back to Russia. The relationship between the Foreign Committee and the central office of the United Organization abroad was a close one.32 The war in countries hostile to Russia (such as Germany) and the Revolution of 1917 brought this organizational framework to an end. Nonetheless, could it be considered to have provided a pattern for the second – post-revolutionary – exile? Were there elements of continuity? It seems that, in the end, the various splits in the Bund, along the lines of the boundaries of the new states in which the Bundists happened to be after the collapse of the Russian Empire, contested the leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Bund. Due to the loss of members who became Communists, the Bund was reduced to tiny surviving units in Russia itself. Eventually, the Bundists abroad seem to have shifted their allegiance to the Polish Bund, which became the main heir to the preFirst World War party. For a short time, though, the Bund was a kind of ‘small International’ in itself, Abramovitch representing, for instance, the Latvian Bund at the founding conference of the ‘Second and a Half’ International in Vienna in February 1921.33 With the consolidation of the Polish Bund, which joined the LSI at a late stage, in 1930, the relationship with the remnants of the Russian Bund abroad seems to have been rather uneasy. The leaders of the Polish Bund expressed their discontent with the Berliners, mainly Abramovitch. At least until 1924, there is evidence of a Foreign Delegation of the Russian Social Democratic Bund: in 1922, together with other socialist foreign delegations from Russia, it protested against the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in Moscow. In 1924, it took part, in Berlin, in framing the ‘platform’ of the RSDRP (Mensheviks).34 But its leading members – from Abramovitch who early on became a Menshevik leader, to Yudin (Aizenshtat) and Grigori Aronson – were co-opted into the Foreign Delegation of the RSDRP, which remained in Berlin until 1933, when it left for Paris.35 Thus the Bund evolved on a path opposite to the one followed by the Georgian Mensheviks, who were previously fully integrated in the RSDRP but formed a separate party, in the second exile, after the collapse of the independent Georgian state. But who was the Foreign Delegation of the Bund supposed to represent? Did support groups of the Russian Social Democratic Bund in exile still exist? Continuity seems to have prevailed in Berlin, which, in the early twenties, became the capital not only of Russia Abroad but

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also of Yiddishland, at the crossroads of culture and politics. According to Jack Jacobs, the Bundists preserved their leadership in the Peretz literary association between 1916 and 1920,36 when it was dissolved. In February 1921, there were still 200 people who attended the general meeting of the Bundist group, which apparently continued to exist until at least 1928. Vladimir Kossovsky, who was in Berlin in the twenties, only left for Poland at the end of that decade.37 So it seems that the Bundists in Berlin did not completely merge with the group of the RSDRP, which counted approximately 100 people and acted as a consulting assembly.38 Did Bundists in Geneva, Bern, Liége or Paris become Mensheviks and join the social democratic groups existing in those places? Did they become Communists? Did they maintain their former loyalty, or did they join the labor movement in their host countries as the Mensheviks advised their children to do? In this last case, it would have meant a break with the former stress on autonomy. In Paris, the Communists prevailed. The Bundist organization, the Arbeter Ring, which was revived in 1929, considered itself as emanating from the Polish Bund.39 But life abroad acted as a mode of conservation for the people and organizations ‘imported’ from the Russian Empire. The latter remained for a long time the reference point for Jewish exiles or immigrants. Jewish socialists in Buenos Aires, for instance, still considered themselves as Bundists and struggled against the Evsektsiia, which, amazingly, was created not only in the USSR but there as well.40 As Russian Jewry – workers as well as intellectuals, among them former students of the ‘colonies’ abroad – spread throughout the world, so did the spirit of the Bund and of other political groups emanating from the Russian Empire. Thus, in addition to forming the network which allowed the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States to help provide European socialists (and mainly Jews among them) with visas as the Nazis invaded France, the Bund abroad also took part in a transfer of ideology as well as of forms of organization. In that sense, its history definitely deserves more attention and scholarly work.

Notes 1. Protokoly Bazelkogo sezda zagranychnykh grupp RSDRP (Paris, 1909). 2. V. Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, ed. S. Portnoy (New York, 1979), p. 223.

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3. Ibid., pp. 222, 299. 4. H. J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA, 1972), p. 93. 5. O. Piatnitsky, Souvenirs d’un bolchevik, 1896–1917 (Paris, 1931), pp. 188, 227. 6. Otkliki Bunda, 5 (February 1911), 16. 7. ‘Bezpartiinye organizatsii i Bund,’ Studenchesky Listok, 5/6 (February 1914), 9ff. 8. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., pp. 222, 302. 9. C. Weill, Marxistes russes et social-démocratie allemande, 1898–1904 (Paris, 1977), and Étudiants russes en Allemagne, 1900–1914 (Paris, 1996). 10. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit., pp. 93–4. 11. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., p. 301. 12. Shestoi sezd obedinenoi organizatsii grupp sodeistvia Bundu zagranitsei, quoted according to B. Brachmann, Russische Sozialdemokraten in Berlin, 1895–1914 (Berlin, 1962), p. 68. For 1903–4, see ‘POSDR. Rapports des groupes locaux des différentes villes d’Europe (occidentale) sur leurs travaux et leur situation en 1903–1904’ (in Russian, title given by the Bibliothéque nationale, Paris, mimeographed), p. 10. For Cöthen, Izvestiia Ts. K. RSDRP, 3 (October 11, 1907), 6. For Jena, see K. Brundig, Die Weimar-Jenaer ‘Iskra’-Tradition. Russische revolutionäre Studenten in Jena (Jena, 1978), p. 86. 13. R. Meyer-Leviné, Vie et mort d’un révolutionnaire. Eugen Leviné et les conseils ouvriers de Baviére (Paris, 1980), p. 33; Zagranichnaia Gazeta, 4 (April 13, 1908), 6–7. 14. Izvestiia Ts. K. RSDRP, 3 (11 October, 1907), 6. 15. L. Fritsche, ‘Die Rolle der russischen Studenten an der Technischen Hochschule Dresden in der Zeit von 1900–1914’ (unpublished dissertation, Dresden, 1970). 16. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., pp. 268–9; Poslednie izvestiia, 102 (December 19, 1902/January 1, 1903); PSR Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. See also J. Wertheimer, ‘Between Tsar and Kaiser: The Radicalization of Russian-Jewish University Students in Germany,’ Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, XXVIII (1983), 332. 17. F. Stepun, Vergangenes und Unvergängliches, vol. I: 1884–1914 (Munich, 1947), pp. 147–50, as well as PSR Archives, Amsterdam, for 1907. 18. Vorwärts, 100 (April 29, 1905), 3rd supplement, 2. 19. N. Weinstock, Le Pain de misère: l‘histoire du mouvement ouvrier juif en Europe, vol. III: L’Europe centrale et orientale, 1914–1945 (Paris, 1986), p. 122; L. Stern (ed.), Die Auswirkungen der ersten russischen Revolution von 1905–1907 auf Deutschland, vol. I (Berlin, 1954), doc. 12, pp. 60–4. 20. Staatsarchiv München, Pol. Dir. Mün., 311–13. 21. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit., p. 242. 22. ‘Berlinskaia gruppa sodeistviia RSDRP. Otchet za period oktiabr–mart 1903–1904’; ‘Berlinskaia gruppa sodeistviia RSDRP – zagranichnym gruppam. Otvet na pismo Berlinskoi gruppy’ (1904; mimeograph); Izvestiia Ts. K. RSDRP, 3 (October 11, 1907), 6; Piatnitsky, Souvenirs, op. cit., pp. 187–8, as well as Biulleten Komiteta Zagranichnoi Organizatsii RSDRP, 1 (January 7/20, 1913). 23. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., pp. 238–9, 260–3 ; Tobias, The Jewish

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Bund, op. cit., p. 93. 24. W. J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914 (London, 1975), pp. 161, 279. 25. Poslednie izvestiia, II, 102 (December 19, 1902/January 1, 1903). 26. Fishman, East End, op. cit., p. 250. 27. N. Weinstock, Le Pain de misère, op. cit., vol. II: L’Europe centrale et occidentale (Paris, 1984), p. 112. 28. N. L. Green, Les travailleurs immigrés juifs à la Belle époque. Le ‘Pletzl’ de Paris (Paris, 1984), pp. 217, 135. She quotes F. Kursky, Unzer shtime [Paris] (February 4, 1939), as well as the Bund Archives in New York, on p. 305. 29. H. Mendel, Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire juif (Grenoble, 1982), p. 134. 30. J. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset des civilisations vol. IV: Des prodromes du bolchevisme à une Société des Nations (Paris, 1938), p. 284. 31. Green, Les Travailleurs, op. cit., pp. 109, 135, 202, 223–4. 32. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., pp. 299–302, 466; Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit., pp. 92–3. 33. R. Abramovitch, ‘Mensheviki i sotsialisticheskii Internatsional (1918–1940 gody),’ in Mensheviks, ed. Yu. Felshtinsky (Benson, Vermont, 1988), p. 271. Despite its title, the paper ends with the founding Congress of the LSI at Hamburg in 1923. 34. L. Haimson (ed.), The Mensheviks: From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War (Chicago and London, 1974), p. 257. 35. See also, A. Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1997). 36. J. Jacobs, ‘Written Out of History: Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic,’ in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. M. Brenner and D. J. Penslar (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998), p. 132. 37. See his biography at the end of Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit. 38. Haimson (ed.), The Mensheviks, op. cit., p. 320. 39. Weinstock, Le Pain de misère, op. cit., vol. III, p. 134. 40. E. Bilsky, ‘Ethnicité et classe ouvrière: les travailleurs juifs à Buenos Aires (1900–1930),’ Le Mouvement social, 159 (April–June 1992), 39–56.

Part II The Bund in Poland between the Two World Wars

5 Creating a Bundist CounterCulture: Morgnshtern and the Significance of Cultural Hegemony Jack Jacobs

Bundists in Poland in the decade preceding the beginning of the Second World War were not likely to have been attentive to the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. They acted, however, as if they agreed, at least in part, with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which he developed in the 1920s. Gramsci argued that a governing class attempts to maintain its position by keeping control not only over political and economic institutions, but also over those in the intellectual and cultural spheres. According to Gramsci, cultural supremacy was in fact a precondition to political rule. Thus, he insisted, the proletariat must break bourgeois cultural hegemony, must instill its own values and achieve a limited hegemony of its own, before it could hope to seize control of the state.1 The Bund in Poland recognized that it was not likely to come to political power in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It continued to engage in vigorous political and economic organizing, just as it had in earlier phases of its existence, but it devoted particularly sustained attention during these years – and had some of its greatest successes – in the cultural and educational spheres. The Bundist organizations for children, youth, sports, and culture which blossomed in Poland during the interwar years self-consciously strove to differentiate their goals from those of superficially comparable organizations affiliated with other Jewish movements, and tended to derive their symbols and sense of purpose from groups affiliated with the social democratic parties of Central Europe. The auxiliary organizations affiliated with the Bund underscored their sense of themselves by aligning with international, socialist bodies, rather 59

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than with Jewish leagues or federations, and by harshly criticizing non-Bundist Jewish groups. These criticisms to the contrary notwithstanding, however, the ancillary organizations of the Bund generally preferred to think of themselves not so much in terms of their differences from the various Zionist or religious movements active within Polish Jewry, but rather in terms of their similarities with the ancillary organizations of other socialist movements. They were ‘above all revolutionary Socialists, and only secondarily Jewish Socialists.’2 In stressing the fact that Polish Bundists, including those active in the cultural organizations affiliated with the Bund, tended to emphasize their ties to other socialists rather than to other Jews, I by no means intend to deny Moyshe Kligsberg’s assertion that the youth movements of Polish Jewry – including the Bundist movement – were remarkably similar to each other, and tended to promote the same, distinctive, life style.3 I intend to argue, however, that the political and psychological needs of the Bund during the interwar period led its leaders, and the leaders of its auxiliary organizations, to accent their ties to non-Jewish workers outside of Poland more than those to bourgeois Jews within it. A full examination of this issue would necessitate a detailed study of a number of organizations and institutions, including the SKIF (Socialist Children’s Union), Tsukunft (a Bundist-oriented youth movement), the TSYSHO (Central Jewish School Organization), YAF (which was made up of Jewish working-class women), the Kultur lige, and the Medem Sanatorium.4 In this chapter, however, I will focus exclusively on Morgnshtern – the Bundist association for the promotion of physical education among Jewish workers and their children – and will use a brief sketch of Morgnshtern as a springboard from which to make some generalizations about Bundist counter-culture in interwar Poland.5

Bundist-oriented sports organizations were active in specific cities, such as Cracow, long before the official creation of Morgnshtern.6 In Warsaw, for example, the gymnastics groups which met in the building of the Society for the Protection of Health [TOZ] in the early 1920s, while formally non-political, were allegedly organized and composed exclusively of Bundists and those likely to be sympathetic to that movement.7 Morgnshtern per se, however, was not officially established until the end of 1926, and did not hold its first Poland-wide conference until April of 1929. The first Morgnshtern conference, which was held in Warsaw and

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attended by delegates representing approximately 4000 individual members8 – can legitimately be taken to mark the emergence of Morgnshtern as a full-fledged, Poland-wide organization. Unlike most other organizations promoting sports and athletics, Morgnshtern emphasized activities which large numbers of individuals could engage in simultaneously, rather than either team or individual sports. The Morgnshtern groups which were active in numerous cities and towns throughout Poland in the 1930s, while sponsoring a range of activities, tended, for example, to promote gymnastics, hiking, cycling, and swimming.9 These activities were stressed because of their ‘mass’ character, and because they did not require a great deal of practice. It was understood from the outset that the workers at whom Morgnshtern was aimed had relatively little time to devote to athletics, and insufficient disposable income to become involved in sports that required expensive equipment or training. Initially, the Morgnshtern groups tended not only to promote specific activities, but also to de-emphasize certain sports that were widely popular among European workers, including soccer and boxing. From the perspective of the Morgnshtern leadership, soccer was overly oriented towards emphasis on individual accomplishment, and towards the glorification of ‘champions.’ ‘Sports-business, commerce in football and with. . . convictions,’ the Yugnt-veker sneered in 1929, ‘our sportsmen leave for the “experts” in the field of political and societal commerce – for the Left Poalei-Zion with its “stars,” mishtayns gezogt [of whom some think so highly].’10 This, I hasten to add, should not be taken to mean that there were no soccer teams affiliated with Morgnshtern. Teams such as Kraft, Veker, and Charney played in Warsaw under Morgnshtern’s auspices as early as 1929.11 But soccer simply did not receive the kind of support from Morgnshtern that it received from other sports associations.12 Opposition to boxing within the ranks of Morgnshtern ran somewhat deeper. The non-Jewish Polish workers’ sports organization made a formal decision to allow boxing at the end of the 1920s. The first Morgnshtern conference, on the other hand, never so much as considered the issue. Moreover, Bundist representatives to the international workers’ sports organization spoke forcefully against the promotion of boxing at several different congresses.13 However, by the late thirties, the Warsaw branch of Morgnshtern – which was by far the largest branch of Morgnshtern in all of Poland – had an official, active, section devoted to boxing. The spokesmen for this section insisted that health concerns, which had been raised by opponents of boxing,

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had proven to be unfounded. They also pointed out – in what may have been a political analogy – that boxing was first and foremost a defensive sport, but that it teaches an ‘important truth about life, that one can best defend oneself if one attacks.’14 Did Morgnshtern cave in to bourgeois values in making a place for soccer and boxing within its organization? Possibly. An alternative explanation, however, is that its leadership was relatively flexible, and willing to listen to what rank-and-file Jewish workers really wanted rather than impose pre-existing ideas on a population unreceptive to them. However we are to explain the changes in Morgnshtern’s stance, Morgnshtern remained, throughout the period under discussion, proud of the fact that it attracted a different social element than did organizations like Maccabi. ‘You’ll look in vain for a word of Yiddish or even a word of Hebrew in the Warsaw Maccabi,’ Arbeter-sportler reports in 1929. ‘This is a gang of Moritzes and Monieks . . . which is . . . downright hostile, to all that is truly, democratically, Jewish . . . a bunch which is ashamed of Yiddish and which chops Polish, though not without errors.’15 Morgnshtern, finally, also prided itself on treating women athletes differently than did other sports clubs. It deliberately chose not to create a special commission for women, and stressed that such a commission was not necessary because women already played a prominent role in the organization. Approximately half of the members of the Warsaw branch’s gymnastics section were female, and so were half of those in the handball group, among others. Moreover, according to a report on its activities in 1938 issued by the Warsaw branch, ‘women participate actively not only among the “sports consumers”, that is, the members, but also among the “producers”, that is, among the instructors . . . and activists of the society.’16 Organizing in the context of the depression, during which widespread unemployment among Polish Jews led to hunger, and to the need for many adolescents to leave school, Morgnshtern emphasized that it was not merely a sports movement, but a link in a chain of socialist institutions. While its methods differed from those of socialist trade union or cooperative organizations, Morgnshtern stressed its goal was identical to that of these other organizations. ‘Without bread, without freedom, and labor rights,’ its organ insisted, ‘. . . we will not have a sports movement. One can’t lead sports with an empty stomach.’17 The Lodz branch of Morgnshtern, similarly, in a call for support issued in 1931, pointed out that the bourgeoisie attempted to co-opt youth through a variety of means, and that sport was among its most important vehicles.

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Under the mask of physical education there are produced in the Maccabis, Bar Kochbas, Hashmoneans . . . slaves for the . . . capitalist order; nationalists are raised there, supporters of militarism, of shiny epaulets and ringing little swords. The bourgeois sports clubs are the nest of hatred against the working class and its ideals of liberation.18 Thus, just as the working class had to create its own organizations in politics and in the economic arena, the Bundists reasoned, so too was it necessary to create separate, socialist, sports organizations, in order to tear working-class youth away from the injurious influence of bourgeois sports. When, in 1930, an anonymous member of Morgnshtern wrote an article in which she suggested that the only difference between Morgnshtern and bourgeois sports organizations was that Morgnshtern was made up of workers, and in which she noted that the actual day-to-day work of the organization did not differ from that of its rivals, the editors of Arbeter-sportler disagreed in no uncertain terms. To these editors, the content of Morgnshtern’s work was markedly different from that of non-socialist sports organizations because Morgnshtern explicitly fought against the formation of individual ‘masters’ or ‘sport acrobats’ at the expense of other members.19 Morgnshtern, moreover, also differed, these editors alleged, in that it published and distributed literature consistent with its socialist goals. As an example of this work, the editors pointed to a brochure by Julius Deutsch, who had, since 1926, headed not only the Austrian socialist self-defense group, the Schutzbund, but also the sports organization linked to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAP), the Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich (ASKÖ).20 The interest of the editors of Arbeter-sportler in translating Deutsch is by no means surprising. The Polish Bund was politically closer to the SDAP than to any other major party in Central Europe, and far closer to the Austro-Marxist perspective than to the perspective of the PPS or of the SPD. To be sure, the ancillary organizations affiliated with the Bund did not precisely parallel their Austrian counterparts in all respects. There was, on the one hand, a far broader range of ancillary organizations associated with the Austrian party than there was with the Bund. I suspect that there was also a far greater cultural gap between the Austro-Marxists and the rank-and-file of the Austrian social democratic party than between the Bundist leadership and those participating in the Bundist movement. This latter distinction,

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however, was not recognized during the years of the Austrian First Republic, and thus had no impact on the Bundist tendency to admire and look up to their comrades in Vienna. Thus, a general political orientation among Polish Bundists helps to explain why the second international Workers’ Olympics, which was held in Red Vienna in July of 1931, and to which Morgnshtern sent a delegation of around 100 athletes, made such a strong impression on many of the young Polish Jews who participated in it.21 The Bundists were warmly received by their Austrian hosts, and very excited by the chance to see with their own eyes the considerable accomplishments of their Austrian comrades. To be sure, the Polish government did not always make participation in workers’ olympics or other events easy. In fact, Morgnshtern was regularly subjected to political repression. Between 1929 and 1934, divisions of Morgnshtern in 32 different Polish cities were closed, for varying lengths of time, by order of the government.22 The government, moreover, refused to allow 300 members of Morgnshtern to travel to Belgium in order to take part in the third Workers’ Olympics (which was held in Antwerp in the summer of 1937). As the level of anti-Semitism in Poland palpably increased, and the international situation deteriorated, Morgnshtern felt obliged to take action. Just as the Austrian socialists had created a defense organization directly linked to its sports group, so too did the third country-wide conference of Morgnshtern, held in May of 1939, resolve to create a section devoted to so-called ‘defensive-sports’ – including marksmanship. But neither governmental oppression nor anti-Semitism nor the grim economic context in which their members and potential members lived prevented the Morgnshtern from engaging in successful organizing efforts.23 Membership in Morgnshtern was not stable. Large numbers of individuals moved in and out of its ranks each year. It is clear, however, that individual branches – such as that in Warsaw – continued to attract substantial numbers of new members in the years leading up to the War, and that the total membership in Morgnshtern tended to grow over time. In its formal report on activities for the year ending February 1, 1937, the Warsaw branch of Morgnshtern, which it identified as the ‘Jewish section of the Workers’ Sports International,’ claimed to have 1500 active members, and thus to be the single largest local sports organization – Jewish or Polish, socialist or not – in all of Poland.24 A year later, the total membership of Morgnshtern’s Warsaw branch had grown yet again, to 1855.25 During this same period, it ought to be noted, the

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Bund itself was increasingly successful in Jewish community council (kehila) and city council elections. It is at least plausible – though admittedly not demonstrable – that some individuals who had previously not had ties to the Bund became more likely to vote for it as a result of participation in Morgnshtern’s activities. Whether or not Morgnshtern did attract new voters for the Bund, it is clear that, operating in a hostile environment, it succeeded in attracting an impressive number of members into its own ranks – but its life was brought to an end only months after its third conference took place. Morgnshtern – like the Bund – was not defeated in the preWar era. It was annihilated during the Second World War by the same forces that brutally tore out the heart of European Jewry.

Like their Austrian socialist comrades in Vienna, the leaders of Morgnshtern had hoped to help create and implant a counterhegemonic culture, with proletarian values, within a portion of the working class. Organizations like SKIF and Tsukunft had aims comparable to those of the Austrian Rote Falken, and had, alongside Morgnshtern and other groups, begun the process of creating a Bundist counter-culture. But Red Vienna – immeasurably stronger than the Polish Bund and with far greater resources at its disposal – was swamped and drowned in 1934, and the Bund suffered a similar fate half a decade later.26 The history of Morgnshtern, I conclude, may well shed light not only on the history of the Bund, but also on the viability of Gramscian or neo-Gramscian proposals. Morgnshtern was more successful than were its rivals in the world of Polish Jewry. Neither Morgnshtern itself nor the network of Bundist counter-cultural organizations as a whole, however, could save its adherents from the horrors of Treblinka or Auschwitz. Cultural power within the world of Polish Jewry had considerable symbolic and psychological benefits, but it did not compensate in the long run for relative lack of power in the political and economic arenas of the world at large.

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Notes 1. Discussions of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony include J. M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford CA, 1967), pp. 204ff.; J. Joll, Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1978), pp. 12ff; C. Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci,’ in Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London, Boston and Henley, 1979), pp. 168–204; and A. Shoestack Sassoon, ‘Hegemony, War of Position and Political Intervention,’ in Approaches to Gramsci (London, 1982), pp. 94–115 (among many others). 2. Quoted in B. K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, 1967), p. 140. 3. M. Kligsberg, ‘Di yidishe yugnt-bavegung in poyln tsvishn beyde velt milkhomes (a sotsiologishe shtudie),’ in Shtudies vegn yidn in poyln 1919–1939. Di tsvishnshpil fun sotsiale, ekonomishe un politishe faktorn inem kamf fun a minoritet far ir kiem, ed. S. Fishman (New York, 1974), p. 174. 4. The work of SKIF and of Tsukunft are discussed in J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Di geshikhte fun a yugnt, der klayner bund – yugnt-bund tsukunft in poyln (New York, 1946). Cf. E. Patt [Pat], ‘Mir zaynen yung un dos iz sheyn, leyvik hodes un der sotsialistisher kinder-farband “skif”,’ in Leyvik hodes, biografie un shriftn (New York, 1962), pp. 342–56. The single best published source on the Medem Sanatorium is Kh. Sh. Kazdan (ed.), Medem-sanitorie-bukh (Tel Aviv, 1971). TSYSHO is described in Kh. Sh. Kazdan, Di geshikhte fun yidishn shulvezn in umophengikn poyln (Mexico City, 1947) and in Kh. Sh. Kazdan, ‘Di shul-un kultur-tetikayt,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. IV, ed. S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1972), pp. 287–388. Cf. Shloyme mendelson, zayn lebn un shafn (New York, 1949), pp. 229–53, 266–81; E. Patt [Pat], In gerangl, yankef pat un zayn dor ([New York], 1971), pp. 155–92. 5. There are no published, scholarly, secondary sources devoted to Morgnshtern. After I had already completed much of my work for this chapter, I was given access to a draft version of R. Gechtman’s unpublished paper ‘Socialist Mass Politics through Sports: The Bund’s Morgnshtern in Poland, 1926–1939.’ My thanks to Gechtman for allowing me to read and make use of his fine piece, the approach and conclusions of which largely parallel my own. 6. The group in Cracow, Jutrzenka, was active even before the First World War, see J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1926–1932,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. V (New York, 1981), p. 136. 7. B. Goldshtayn, Tsvantsik yor in varshever ‘bund’ 1919–1939 (New York, 1960), p. 127. 8. Sh. Tshernetski, ‘Unzere sportler marshirn faroys (der ershter tsuzamenfor fun unzere sport-organizatsies),’ Yugnt-veker, 10 (May 15, 1929), 4. 9. These were not, however, the only activities – or types of activities – conducted under Morgnshtern’s auspices. Ping-pong and chess, for example, also attracted some support. 10. Tshernetski, ‘Unzere sportler marshirn farogs,’ op. cit. 11. ‘Varshever turney fun der ’n. folkstsaytung,’ Arbeter-sportler, 3 (September 1, 1929), 1. 12. Opposition to soccer was apparently stronger in the Czech workers’ sports

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

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organization than in Morgnshtern. However, the Czechs, too, eventually came round and permitted soccer within their ranks. Similarly, there were principled arguments made against soccer by Austrian socialists. Nevertheless, in 1926, the organized workers’ soccer organization of Austria formally affiliated with the Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich. The Austrian workers continued to play soccer after that date – they merely forswore matches with bourgeois clubs, see W. Maderthaner, ‘Sport für das Volk,’ in Die ersten 100 Jahre. Österreichische Sozialdemokratie, 1888-1988, ed. H. Maimann (Vienna, Munich, 1988), p. 175. Arbeter-gezelshaft far fizisher dertsiung ‘morgnshtern’ in poyln, varshever optaylung, a yor arbet, tetikayts-berikht far der tsayt fun II.1 1937 bizn II.1 1938, p. 21. Ibid. ‘Der emese ponim fun varshever “makabi”,’ Arbeter-sportler, 5 (November 1, 1929), 7. Arbeter-gez. far fizisher dertsiung ‘morgnshtern’ in poyln, varshever optaylung, 1938, yor barikht, p. 7. ‘Unzere oyfgabn,’ Arbeter-sportler (April 5, 1930), 2. Arb[eter] gezelshaft far fizisher dertsiung ‘morgnshtern’ in poyln, optaylung in lodz, ‘Vendung’ (Lodz, February, 1931) (Bund Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, MG 9-159). ‘Vi azoy darf oyszen a sotsialistishe sport organizatsie?,’ Arbeter-sportler, 9–10 (November 15, 1930), 7. For a brief introduction to the activities and ideology of the ASKÖ see Maderthaner, ‘Sport für das Volk,’ op. cit., pp. 174–7. Gechtman, ‘Socialist Mass Politics through Sports,’ op. cit., pp. 8–16, contains a discussion of the Yiddish translation of Deutsch’s work on the relationship between sports and politics published by Farlag arbeter sportler in 1930. Deutsch’s writings on sports went well beyond those translated into Yiddish, and ideas he expressed in his German writings seem to have been echoed by the leadership of Morgnshtern even when they were not literally reproduced in Poland for Jewish workers. Deutsch’s claims that the ‘worker-spectator was a victim of his own desire for cheap distractions, which in the guise of political neutrality estranged him from his own class’ and that ‘[c]apitalist sports . . . seduced the spectator with the achievements of stars,’ from Julius Deutsch, Unter Roten Fahnen: Vom Rekord zum Massensport (Vienna, 1931), pp. 3–12, as described in the extremely helpful work by H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, Oxford, 1991), would doubtless have been accepted as wholly correct by those who set the tone for Morgnshtern. Goldshtayn, Tsvantsik yor, op. cit., p. 222. Cf. Hertz, ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1926–1932,’ op. cit., pp. 90–1. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Di geshikhte fun a yugnt, der klayner bund – yugntbund tsukunft in poyln (New York, 1946), p. 445. By the time of its second country-wide conference in 1934, Morgnshtern had increased its total membership from 4000 to 5000 workers, and was active in 112 geographic locations. Arbeter-gezelshaft far fizisher dertsiung ‘morgnshtern’ in poyln, yidishe sektsie

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fun arbeter sport internatsional, varshever optaylung, barikht fun der tsayt 1.II.1936–1.II.1937. 25. Arbeter-gez. far fizisher dertsiung ’morgnshtern’ in poyln, varshever optaylung, a yor arbet, tetikayts-barikht far der tsayt fun II.1 1937 bizn II.1 1938. During this period, the Morgnshtern branch in Lodz had 658 members. Cf. Tetikayts-barikht, ‘morgnshtern’ optaylung in lodz, 31 mai 1937 bizn 1 marts 1938. 26. The cultural activities of the Austrian socialists of the First Republic are described and critiqued in Gruber, Red Vienna, op. cit.

6 Kossovsky, Portnoy and Others: the Role of Members of the Bund’s Founding Generation in the Interwar Polish Bund Gertrud Pickhan

The history of the Bund is generally divided into the period before and the period after 1918, and the question of change and continuity between the Bund in the Russian Empire and that in the Polish Second Republic is very seldom posed.1 The division of the Bund’s history into two parts is doubtless justified in several respects, particularly in regard to the respective states in which the Bund acted, and to the worldhistorical watershed of the year 1918.2 Such an approach, however, overlooks the partial overlap and continuity of personnel between the Bund in the Russian Empire and in interwar Poland. Thus, for example, the revolution of 1905 played a major role in the early political socialization of Henryk Erlich (born 1882) and Victor Alter (born 1890), the Bund’s undisputed leaders in interwar Poland. Both participated actively in the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Henryk Erlich as a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and Victor Alter in Moscow and the Ukraine. Yet Erlich and Alter, like most other leading Bundists of the interwar period, did not belong to the legendary ‘veteran generation’ who had founded the Bund in 1897 and struggled through the repressions of the Czarist era to make it an effective party organization with a large membership. In the Second Polish Republic, in which Polish national interests came first, the Bund had to work under wholly different conditions from those prevailing in the multinational Russian Empire. The situation of the Jewish minority in Poland was an ambivalent one. The democratic constitution granted them formal equality and Jewish cultural and political life flourished. At the same time, Jews faced strong anti-Semitism on practically all levels of society. With the 69

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exception of a few months during the Polish–Soviet War, the Bund was now a legalized party but no longer – as it had been in the Russian Empire as a member of the RSDRP – part of a national multi-ethnic umbrella party. Those party members who had been born in the 1860s and 1870s and who were Polish citizens after 1918 consciously experienced both phases of the Bund’s history as adults. In what follows I will describe, using two examples, how they managed to incorporate their experiences of the period before the First World War and the Revolution into the interwar party, the traditions they continued to embody even under altered circumstances, and the tensions that arose between them and the younger generation. Before turning to an account of the significance of two of the most important representatives of the founding generation in interwar Poland, Vladimir Kossovsky and Noyakh Portnoy, a brief sketch of the main biographical patterns among the Bundists before and after 1918 will be provided. The biographical notes on the post-1905 careers of the 50 most important Bundists, compiled by Henry Tobias, reveal that 22 of them were active largely in the Russian Empire until 1918;3 11 of them were among the Bund’s representatives abroad, and 14 retired from active Party life after the failure of the 1905 revolution. After the October Revolution, 20 of the leading Bundists continued to live in the new Soviet state; chief among them were Mark Liber and Aaron Weinstein, both of whom fell victim to the Stalinist terror of 1937 and 1938.4 Thirteen of the Bundists included in Tobias’s study remained in or emigrated to the West. The most prominent Bundists who emigrated to the United States were John Mill, who left Europe in 1915, and Vladimir Medem, who went to the USA after an inner-party dispute in 1922 and died there in 1924.5 Ten of the Bundists mentioned in Tobias’s work settled in the reestablished Republic of Poland. While Portnoy and Kossovsky, who will be dealt with in detail in what follows, concentrated their efforts in the interwar period almost exclusively on the central Party level, the married couples Arkadi and Pati Kremer and Pavel and Ana Rozental were active above all in the Vilna Bund organization and its educational and school activities. A contemporary wrote the following about A. Kremer, one of the Bund’s co-founders, who lived in France from 1912 until 1920 and was active at the Jewish teachers’ college in Vilna from his return there in 1921 until his death in 1935: ‘As a politician, A. Kremer was known to the younger generation only through historical Party literature. His former students, however, graduates of the [now] closed teachers’ college in Vilna, have carried his name to the

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remotest corners of the country.’6 Also worth mentioning here is the fact that 26 of the Bundists listed by Tobias died of natural causes, while the lives of 12 others ended violently as a result of Soviet or Nazi terror. In the case of 10 members of the pioneer generation of Bundists, the circumstances of death remain unclear. Kossovsky and Portnoy were fortunate enough to die of natural causes in 1941, albeit after a dramatic escape and reception in the United States, when one was already in his seventies, the other in his eighties. Portnoy headed the Bund’s executive committee throughout the entire interwar period and was thus nominally the number-one man in the Party, which was, however, dedicated throughout its history to the principle of collective leadership. According to the Party statutes, the office of party chairman did not exist. For Bund members in Poland, though, Noyakh Portnoy was something like an honorary chairman, loved and respected not least because of his work for the Party before 1918. Portnoy was born in 1872 in Podbrzezie in the Vilna region.7 After completing his studies at the Jewish teachers’ college in Vilna and working for several years as a teacher, he was arrested for the first time in 1895, together with the Polish socialist Ludwik Kulczycki, in Kovno. Both men were active in an inter-party commission of Jewish, Polish and Lithuanian socialists.8 Portnoy managed to escape from Siberian exile in 1900 and in the years that followed became the Bund’s most important organizer. According to John Mill, Portnoy soon managed to unite all the strands of the entire illegal Party apparatus thanks to his outstanding organizational abilities.9 From an ideological perspective, Portnoy was, by John Mill’s account, influenced in the period before 1918 by his old sympathies for the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. During the First World War in German-occupied Warsaw, Portnoy once again belonged to an inter-party commission of the Bund, PPSLeft, and SDKPiL. Under his pseudonym, Józef, he soon became known among the Jewish workers of Warsaw, who at first believed him to be a ‘tall Christian with a bushy moustache.’10 His stepdaughter Irena Krzywicka, whose mother Portnoy had met during his Siberian exile, described his appearance as that of an ‘English lord’ whom no one would ever have taken for a Jew.11 Krzywicka also mentions a cultural gap between her mother and her stepfather ‘Nyk,’ since in contrast to Portnoy, Felicja Goldbergowa (1872–1959) and her daughter Irena (1899–1994), as assimilated Polish Jews, had no connection whatsoever with Warsaw’s Jewish working-class milieu.12 In 1918 it was Noyakh Portnoy who coined the motto ‘Let us pour the old Bundist wine into new bottles.’13 After the Party was re-established

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in interwar Poland, Portnoy became chairman of the Bund’s central committee and of the Bund’s most important local organization in Warsaw. He held these offices until 1939. In addition he took over the management of the Bund’s central organ, the Naye folkstsaytung, and looked after the Party’s finances.14 Since the Party’s financial circumstances were extremely strained throughout the inter-war period, Portnoy made several fundraising trips to the USA, despite his age. He also decided that the Party should save the money that had been intended for an elaborate celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 1932 and establish a permanent ‘Noyakh Press Fund’ instead, thereby helping to secure the existence of the Bund’s daily newspaper throughout the thirties. As a former teacher, Portnoy was more involved in his party’s work with young people and children than any other leading Bundist in Warsaw. As Shloyme Gilinski, the director of the famous Medem sanatorium for children in Miedzeszyn, noted, the sanatorium rested on two pillars: on the one hand, the ‘Medem legend’ and on the other, the ‘living Józef,’ since Portnoy visited there quite frequently.15 Owing to Alexander Ford’s film on the Medem sanatorium, Mir kumen on, Portnoy is the only prominent Bundist of the interwar period to have been captured in a substantial film sequence. Portnoy himself was, however, already a living legend by the interwar period; as a father figure he stood for the ‘glorious age’ of the pre-war Bund.16 In his obituary, Shloyme Mendelson attributes the fact that Portnoy could become the ‘captain of our ship’ in the stormy twenties and thirties to his inner equilibrium. Mendelson saw Portnoy as ‘a straightforward person without angles or zigzags’ and referred to the ascetic discipline of the pioneer generation, which Portnoy continued to embody in the interwar period, as a new phenomenon in the non-religious social life of Eastern European Jewry, which had, in his opinion, been characterized up until that point by anarchy, exaggerated individualism, and too much love of mockery.17 Portnoy was no great orator, in contrast to Party leaders Erlich and Alter, who were, according to Krzywicka, not only his comrades, but also his closest personal friends. Indeed, Krzywicka mentions his ‘excessive taciturnity’ in private life as well.18 For the Bund, however, Portnoy’s great integrative capacities may have been more important than impressive rhetoric; in an era when the parties of the Left were splintering all around them he managed to keep the organization together. As the ‘Noyakh legend,’ Portnoy used his influence to smooth disputes among different Party groupings. He displayed this talent for the first time in the fiercely tense atmosphere of the years

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immediately following the October Revolution. It was in large part thanks to Portnoy that Party unity was maintained despite opposing positions on the question of joining the Comintern. At the Second Party Conference of the Bund in Poland, held in Danzig/Gdansk in December 1921, Portnoy could rightly claim that the Bund had passed the ‘acid test of history.’19 The Party faced a new ordeal in connection with debates on joining the LSI in 1929–30, and there is some evidence that this time the Party leadership deliberately mobilized the ‘old guard’ in order to push through membership. At the Polish Bund’s Fourth Party Conference, in 1929, this question was the central issue for the first time. After Portnoy opened the conference, it fell to the first speaker, A. Kremer – who had returned to Vilna in 1921 but only joined the Bund organization there in 1927 and immediately assumed the chairmanship20 – to invoke Party tradition. Kremer vividly reminded his audience that before 1918, despite conflicts, the Bund had understood itself to be a part of Social Democracy in Russia, and had belonged to the Second International together with the RSDRP.21 This tradition, he said, must be maintained – in a form adapted to the changed conditions of the interwar period. The vote on membership in the LSI, which was highly controversial within the Party, took place in the summer of 1930. At an extraordinary Party conference held in Lodz, the experienced Party leader Portnoy foiled the attempts of the tsveyer, the strong inner-Party left-wing minority who opposed membership in the LSI, to prevent a quorum by withdrawing their delegates. He interpreted the clause in the Party’s rules stating that the Party conference could only adopt resolutions if at least 60 per cent of the delegates were present as applying to the point in time when a Party Congress had been constituted – that is, before the departure of the left-wing minority. This move permitted the conference to vote for membership in the LSI.22 We do not know whether Portnoy also influenced the decision of the tsveyer to participate in the final plenary session and in this way signal their willingness to remain in the Party. Even after the conference, the Party’s more radical youth in particular remained in upheaval. However, as Ana Rozental, a member of the Bund’s pioneer generation who, like A. Kremer, lived in Vilna, reported, Kremer succeeded, because of his authority and tireless efforts, in gradually getting the members of the Bund’s youth organization Tsukunft to commit themselves to the party line.23 Portnoy’s polemical reply to Alter in 1927 – which was one of the few articles Portnoy penned in the interwar period – shows that this member of the ‘old guard’ still had plenty of fight left in him, particularly when

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it came to central questions of Party identity as it had developed over several decades. Writing in the Bund’s theoretical journal Unzer tsayt, Alter had called for a fundamental reform of the Party. In his view, the Bund needed to abandon the narrow organizational principle of a class-based party and open itself to the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, leftist observant Jews, and left-wing Zionist sympathizers.24 Portnoy firmly countered that ‘There is in fact no place in the Party for religious workers and poor people (not simply religious in the abstract, but pious in practice). . . . And it would be wrong and harmful for our Party to become so broad that it accepted all people who call themselves socialists . . . and yet still have one foot in the Zionist camp.’ For Portnoy, yielding to Alter’s demands would mean ‘the loss of our socialist innocence.’25 It is worth mentioning that, in the years to come, the Bund would not budge from its organizational principle as a decidedly anti-Zionist and non-religious class-based party. At the Lodz Party Conference of 1930 Vladimir Kossovsky sat on the presiding committee as an honorary member along with Arkadi Kremer for the first time since the establishment of the Polish Bund. Kossovsky was in many respects Noyakh Portnoy’s polar opposite: he was a man of words, not of action, a lone wolf and difficult to get along with where Portnoy was a luminous figure who brought people together. Kossovsky, born around 1867 as Nokhum Mendl Levinson, was the son of a well-to-do railway engineer in Kovno and grew up speaking Russian.26 His expulsion from school in 1885, and the failure of his attempt to take his exams as an external student, were experiences that marked his youth. Kossovsky spent several years traveling around as a tutor in private households before joining the early Jewish labor movement in Vilna. He did not, however, learn Yiddish until the late 1890s, and wrote his texts in Russian until 1911–12. In 1897 Kossovsky was one of the founders of the Bund, and, together with Arkadi Kremer and Avrom [Gleb] Mutnik, who had been Kossovsky’s classmate in Kovno, formed the Bund’s first Central Committee. In 1898 he wrote the Bund’s first illegal pamphlet, which was entitled The War of the Polish Socialist Party against the Jewish Workers’ Bund. The conflict with the Polish Socialists would continue to occupy him in the interwar period. Until the First World War, Kossovsky was, along with Vladimir Medem, the main theoretician and ‘the most authoritative publicist in the Bundist movement.’27 The national question and the concept of national cultural autonomy as well as the relationship with the RSDRP and the conflict with Iskra were the central foci of his journalistic activities. It is remarkable in

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this context that, despite massive differences of opinion,28 Kossovsky continued to maintain personal ties with Julius Martov, who was one of the leading Iskra representatives. After his arrest in 1898, and two years in prison, Kossovsky left Russia and remained in exile until 1930 (except for the years of 1905–7). As an emigrant in Berlin, where he remained until 1930 with brief interruptions, Kossovsky continued to address Russian themes intensively. Although a sharp critic of Bolshevik rule, he also wrote approvingly of the ‘sacred fire of the great Russian Revolution.’29 In 1930 Kossovsky, who was suffering from heart disease, was brought to Warsaw by the Bund’s Central Committee and made a permanent member of the editorial staff of the Naye folkstsaytung. In Warsaw, too, as in Berlin, the bachelor Kossovsky lived a very quiet life and did not participate in summer vacation or other leisure activities together with the leading Bundists. We also have accounts of certain difficulties among the editorial staff of the Naye folkstsaytung. Kossovsky’s ponderous and sometimes stubborn manner were apparently no longer suited to the hectic pace of life in the thirties and led to great tensions between him and the editor-in-chief, Erlich.30 And yet Kossovsky was, along with Erlich, Alter and Yoysef Khmurner, one of the Bund’s leading publicists in the 1930s and ‘a great political authority.’31 Of the many articles Kossovsky wrote for the Naye folkstsaytung only a few can be mentioned here: those whose treatment of central aspects of the Jewish labor movement – such as the attitude towards Jews in Russia and in Poland, Jewish nationalism, and general questions within the Party – make them of particular interest. In February 1933, Kossovsky provided an analysis of Russian and Polish anti-Semitism under the heading ‘The Struggle against Anti-Semitism.’32 In Kossovsky’s opinion, the protagonists of anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire had been the Czarist court, government and bureaucracy, while a broad middle-class intelligentsia ‘of humane character’ had dedicated itself to human rights. In Poland, in contrast, anti-Semitism was a ‘deeply rooted social phenomenon with a fixed tradition.’ For Kossovsky, individual middle-class democrats who fought against anti-Semitism were ‘like white crows in the reactionary wilderness.’ He also was not sparing in his criticism of the PPS, and came to the conclusion that, ‘in its relationship to anti-Semitism, the PPS reveals the same opportunism as characterizes its position on other questions of working-class politics.’33 Here we see the continuation into the 1930s of the old Bundist traditions of an extremely troubled relationship with the Polish socialists and of deep sympathies for the Russian intelligentsia.

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In October 1934 Kossovsky wrote in detail about the Jewish Autonomous Region Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East.34 He noted that the integration of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union had been largely successful, but that there were ‘certain problems’ with the Jews in the small towns of the former Pale of Settlement. Birobidzhan could only be helpful, he believed, if it also became a cultural center. Kossovsky, however, criticized the reawakening of ‘territorial sentiment’ outside the Soviet Union in connection with the Birobidzhan experiment and emphasized that Birobidzhan was not a truly autonomous Jewish territory and ‘not free,’ but rather had ‘a master: the Soviet Union.’35 In 1936, under the heading ‘The Same “Diaspora”,’ Kossovsky analyzed the situation in Palestine, thereby providing an updated version of his Party’s traditional anti-Zionist stance.36 According to Kossovsky, Jewish and Arab nationalisms clashed in Palestine and a Jewish minority population was forced to defend itself against an Arab majority. In his view, Palestine thus represented yet again the ‘well known relationship between a national majority and a national minority in our accursed capitalist world,’ and the Jews lived ‘in the same diaspora’ there as everywhere else.37 Not least because of the time he spent in Berlin in the 1920s, Kossovsky remained in a certain sense an outsider in the interwar Polish Bund. At the same time, however, he was respected and admired because of his services to the Bund before 1918. This also enabled him to criticize his comrades in no uncertain terms, for example when it came to the ‘women’s question’ within the party – not exactly an obvious subject of concern for a bachelor during that period. Kossovsky blamed the slight participation of women in the central May Day demonstration of 1935 on the labor parties themselves, since they made too little effort to involve women in their work.38 He went even further, however, noting that even progressive workingmen ‘traditionally had a low opinion of women.’ He cited the example of a working-class woman from Berlin who had complained bitterly at a meeting that even in working-class families it was a scandal if dinner was not on the table on time. In his opinion, matters were no different in Poland. Kossovsky considered the fear expressed by some comrades of women’s alleged tendency to hold ‘reactionary’ views to be unfounded. He pointed out that, on the contrary, they tended in his experience to possess a better sense of reality and to participate in elections with more enthusiasm and commitment than men. Kossovsky accordingly called upon his male comrades to make more of an effort

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to integrate women into the movement. Apart from Kossovsky, few top politicians in the Bund took a serious interest in the ‘women’s question’ beyond perfunctory statements on International Women’s Day.39 The fact that it was the confirmed bachelor Kossovsky who took up this issue in his later years says much about his acute powers of observation and sense of justice. That Kossovsky, despite his advanced years, was able, like his party, to adapt to the requirements of the times and to overcome his – doubtless not wholly groundless – anti-Polish attitudes is revealed by some of the articles he wrote in the second half of the 1930s. At the end of the eventful year 1936 Kossovsky noted that the Polish working class was the only social class which was not poisoned by antiSemitism, and which refused to be used by anti-Semitic politicians.40 He considered an appeal against anti-Semitism launched by Polish working-class youth in Upper Silesia ‘clear evidence of how foreign the opinion that the Jewish question can only be solved by mass emigration is to the class consciousness and class sentiments of conscious Polish workers.’41 For Kossovsky, ‘the secret of victory’ in the municipal elections of December 1938, when the PPS and the Bund obtained an overwhelming majority of votes in Warsaw, Lodz and many other Polish cities, lay above all in the close cooperation between Polish and Jewish trade union organizations during the campaign.42 Mendelson’s 1941 obituary for Kossovsky reveals how Kossovsky, Portnoy and the other pioneers were viewed in the interwar period: He belonged to a generation that was not yet defeated by disappointment. On the contrary: he was filled with faith in humanity, in the masses. For that reason he saw his foremost task as enlightment. . . . In our mad days we may think that this path has outlived its usefulness, that it is obsolete and no longer effective. Our nervous generation no longer has the patience for the slow process of reflection. It is more readily receptive to impulsive authorial eruptions, for flights of fancy that may live but a few hours but which stimulate, entice and affect us like hashish does. Kossovsky remained true to himself and to his [chosen] path. . . . These people had the capacity to construct, they knew the secret of Creation.43 The life histories of those members of the founding generation of the Bund who remained active in the Polish Bund reveal that they managed to maintain into the interwar period the identity they had developed in the Russian Empire through long years of struggle,

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illegality and emigration. They also had the admiration of their younger contemporaries, above all as representatives of a revolutionary tradition. At the same time, however, they remained flexible enough to adapt as far as possible to the changed context of the 1920s and 1930s, to remain politically active and to participate in debates. They thus served as models for their party, significantly contributing to the ability of the organization and membership to keep their bearings under new conditions. On the occasion of Noyakh Portnoy’s 60th birthday, the editorial staff of the Naye folkstsaytung reported to their readership on 19 August 1932 that ‘Comrade Noyakh’ did not wish his biography to appear in the newspaper. They went on to say: ‘We have no doubt: this biography must and will be written.’44 Their expectation remains unfulfilled. It is to be hoped, however, that this article has helped once again, 65 years later, to underline the need for individual and collective biographical studies as contributions to the history of the Bund.

Notes 1. An exception is M. Mishkinsky, ‘Bein Ha’Bund Ha’yashan LaBund Ha’polani,’ Gal-Ed, XIII (1993), 119–33. 2. That the year 1939 represented an even graver existential watershed for contemporaries should not be forgotten, but can only be touched on within the framework chosen for the present chapter. 3. H. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia – From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA, 1972), pp. 347–53. Tobias rightly attributes the incompleteness of his material to the ‘chaotic years of war and revolution, Soviet purge and Nazi occupation,’ ibid., p. 347. 4. See Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit., pp. 348, 353. 5. Both left memoirs of the period before 1918. See J. Mill, Pionern un boyer, 2 vols (New York, 1949); and V. Medem, Fun mayn leben, 2 vols (New York, 1923). The latter has also been published in English as Vladimir Medem: The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, trans. S. A. Portnoy (New York, 1979). 6. Y. Milner, ‘In vilner lerer-seminar,’ in Arkadi, zamlbukh tsum ondenk fun grinder fun ‘bund’ arkadi kremer (New York, 1942), pp. 254–5. 7. When not otherwise indicated, the biographical information on Portnoy and Kossovsky comes from the following biographical dictionaries: Z. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, vol. II (Vilna, 1927), pp. 873–4 [Portnoy]; vol. III (Vilna, 1929), pp. 476–81 [Kossovsky]; Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. VII (New York, 1968), pp. 112–13 [Portnoy]; vol. VIII (New York, 1981), pp. 81–2 [Kossovsky].

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8. On Kulczycki see Sl ´ownik biograficzny dzial´aczy polskiego ruchu robotniczego, vol. III (Warsaw, 1992), pp. 536–9. 9. Mill, Pionern, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 93–4. Mill also wrote: ‘At that time Noyakh was the Central Committee and the Central Committee was Noyakh,’ ibid. 10. ‘Noyakh yekutiel portnoy,’ in Doyres bundistn, ed. J. S. Hertz [Y. Sh. Herts], vol. I (New York, 1956), pp. 68–122; here p. 102. 11. I. Krzywicka, Wyznania gorszyciel ki (Warsaw, 1992), p. 18. ´ 12. Krzywicka, Wyznania, op. cit., pp. 27, 69, 84. 13. ‘Noyakh yekutiel portnoy,’ Doyres, op. cit., vol. I, p. 102. 14. On Portnoy’s importance for the Folkstsaytung, see P. Shvarts, ‘Folkstsaytung,’ in Fun noentn ovar, vol. II (New York, 1956), pp. 303–439, here p. 330. 15. ‘Noyakh yekutiel portnoy,’ Doyres, op. cit., vol. I, p. 112. 16. Ibid., pp. 104–5. 17. S. Mendelson, ‘Unzer noyakh,’ in Shloyme mendelson, zayn lebn und shafn (New York, 1949), pp. 437–40. 18. Krzywicka, Wyznania, op. cit., pp. 18, 69. 19. For a more extensive account, see G. Pickhan, ‘“Feuerprobe der Geschichte”. Der Danziger Parteitag der Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes (Bund) in Polen 1921,’ in Zwischen Lübeck und Novgorod. Wirtschaft, Politik und Kultur im Ostseeraum vom frühen Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Norbert Angermann zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. O. Pelc and G. Pickhan (Lüneburg, 1996), pp. 421–39. 20. Kremer’s wife Pati explained that he had hesitated so long before rejoining the Vilna Bund because of his extremely time-consuming duties as a teacher at the Jewish teachers’ college. Arkadi, zamlbukh, op. cit., p. 67. 21. There is a detailed report on the conference in the Naye folkstsaytung, 10 (January 11, 1929), 5–6; and Nasza Walka (April 1929), 21–5. 22. See ‘Der oyserordentlekher 5-ter tsuzamenfor fun “bund” in lodz,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 129 (June 8, 1930), 4; ‘Sprawozdanie z obrad V Zjazdu Bundu,’ Nasza Walka (June–July 1930), 19–21. 23. Arkadi, zamlbukh, op. cit., p. 257. Ana Rozental was arrested by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in Soviet-occupied Vilna and died in a Soviet prison, see ‘Ana rozental,’ in Doyres, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 180–92, here p. 191. 24. V. Alter, ‘Oyf bundishe temes,’ Unzer tsayt, 1 (October 15, 1927), 45–60. 25. Noyakh [Portnoy], ‘Zelbst-analiz oder pilpul,’ Unzer tsayt, 2 (November 15, 1927), 26–31, here 30–1. 26. See note 7. 27. J. Jacobs, ‘Kosovsky, Vladimir,’ in Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism, ed. R. A. Gorman (Westport, CT., 1985), pp. 242–4, here p. 243. 28. ‘Vladmir kosovski,’ Doyres, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 11–67, here p. 31. In the 1890s Martov had supported the Jewish labor movement in Vilna, see Tobias, The Jewish Bund, op. cit., pp. 27, 55–7. 29. Quoted in S. Mendelson, ‘Vladimir kosovski,’ in Shloyme mendelson, op. cit., pp. 441–6, here 446. 30. ‘Vladimir kosovski,’ Doyres, op. cit., p. 36. 31. Shvarts, ‘Folkstsaytung,’ op. cit., pp. 29–30.

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32. V. Kossovsky, ‘Der kamf kegn antisemitizm,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 44 (February 10, 1933), 3. 33. Ibid. 34. V. Kossovsky, ‘Biro-bidzhan un teritorializm,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 326 (October 26, 1934), 4. 35. Ibid. 36. V. K[ossovsky], ‘Der zelbiker “golus”,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 125 (April 23, 1936), 2. 37. Ibid. 38. V. Kossovsky, ‘Di arbeter-froy in der bavegung,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 124 (May 3, 1935), 3. 39. See also D. Blatman, ‘Women in the Jewish Labor Bund in Interwar Poland,’ in Women in the Holocaust, ed. D. Ofer and L. J. Weitzman (New Haven/London, 1998), pp. 68–84. 40. V. Kossovsky, ‘Di tsugeshpitstkayt fun antisemitizm in poyln,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 381 (December 25, 1936), 3. 41. V. K[ossovsky], ‘A balerndiker fakt,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 10 (January 10, 1937), 3. 42. V. Kossovsky, ‘Der sod fun dem nitsokhn,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 276 (January 27, 1939), 6. 43. Mendelson, ‘Vladimir kosovski,’ op. cit., pp. 442–6. 44. Quoted in ‘Noyakh yekutiel portnoy,’ op. cit., p. 107.

7 The Bund: History of a Schism* Abraham Brumberg

In 1918–19 the Bund, like many socialist parties, was strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution. This was especially true for those factions and groups which condemned the pro-war position of most social-democratic parties, foremost among them the German party with its overwhelming support of ‘patriotic’ voices in Germany. In general, the Bund was further to the left than many other socialdemocratic parties. The majority of members supported the principles articulated at the Zimmerwald conference of 1916, calling for an end to the war and for a proletarian revolution all over Europe. The capitulation of the SPD in 1914 had come as a traumatic shock to most Bundists. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Comintern, organized under Lenin’s leadership in 1919, should appeal so strongly to them. Communist influence was especially strong in the Russian Bund, founded during the birth-pangs of Polish independence. A large part of the Russian Bund accepted all of the so-called ‘Twenty-One Points,’ the conditions for membership in the International. Such acceptance effectively meant renouncing in toto the socialist democratic tradition and conducting ruthless war against all ‘traitorous’ and reformist parties as well as against all reformist-oriented members of parties applying for admission. In 1921, under pressure from the Communist regime and from its own pro-communist members, the Russian Bund dissolved itself.1 In Poland, however, the Bund survived. Its membership included many old party comrades, and although its stance was never as wholly pro-communist as the Russian party’s, the left-wing faction dominated. It was ready to accept nearly all Comintern principles, with one and a half exceptions: the demand that every new group support the Comintern unanimously, and the demand that every group rid itself 81

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once and for all of those members who did not wholly agree with the Third International. In the final analysis this would have meant abandoning all independence of the Bund and effectively liquidating the Bund as an autonomous part of the Communist International. Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool leftists in the Bund could stomach that. The sense of membership in the party, of belonging to a mishpokhe (family) – whatever the disagreements among its kinfolk – superseded all ideological issues. Throughout the history of the Bund such devotion remained the primary safeguard of the Bund’s continuing existence as a party. It was not the monolithic party demanded by the communists, but a party with internal democracy and a determination to remain independent and whole. At the same time, not only the left-wing but also the right, or ‘centrist,’ faction within the Bund remained sympathetic to the Communist International. In 1921 the Second Conference of the Polish Bund met in Danzig. The rightists or centrists proposed a resolution advocating that the Bund join the Comintern, although unlike the leftists they were prepared to accept only 16 of the Comintern’s principles. (A small number of Bundists voted to accept all 21 points, and after the Congress they left the party, most of them soon returning to the fold.) The left-wing supporters of the ‘second’ thesis won the vote, and were thereafter known as di tsveyer (the ‘twos’), in distinction from the centrist or right-wing eynser (the ‘ones’).2 In the next six or seven years the two terms were not used very often. This could well have been a consequence of the resolution banning factions within the party, endorsed by the Bund Conference of 1921, or of the firm ban on factions, approved by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the Tenth Party Conference some months earlier. On the other hand, the long-time executive secretary of the Bund, Emanuel Novogrudski [Nowogrudski], may well have been right in his assessment, in his unpublished memoirs, that the policy sprang from a desire ‘to consolidate internally the party ranks after the stormy discussions on the eve of the conference in order to facilitate subsequent activities in conditions of isolation from an international socialist center.’ 3 In any event, whatever the motivation, the actual ban appears to have played a relatively minor role. Disagreements continued to exist, and debate was not stifled as it was in the communist camp. The sense of kinship, of internal democracy, alluded to earlier, endured, whether or not the terms eynser and tsveyer were actually used. At the end of the 1920s, however, serious factional conflict flared up. By then the right wing dominated the party and the tsveyer were in

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the minority, although a minority with substantial support and some highly respected advocates. The main issue was whether the Bund should join the LSI, founded in 1923 after the demise of the Second International in 1914, and indeed as a rule referred to henceforth as the Second International. For the eynser, joining the International was essential: the Bund was isolated both in Polish political life and in the international socialist movement. As one of the Bund’s founding members, Noyakh Portnoy, warned, ‘We are in danger of becoming atrophied. Soon all that will remain is a mezuzah on the doorframe and no one will even remember to kiss it.’ He added, ‘I am not speaking of the practical consequences of such a situation for our movement.’4 The writer Dovid Eynhorn, another eynser, agreed. ‘We can no longer remain outside one of the large proletarian “families.” Such isolation essentially means confining ourselves within the Jewish ghetto instead of playing a role within an international organization.’5 It is doubtful whether the Bund’s isolation among socialist parties, and its putative membership in the Socialist International, actually mattered a great deal to the majority of members, or seriously influenced the Bund’s work in Poland. Whatever the practical consequences, however, in 1930 the Bund did join the LSI, and party leaders participated in major policy discussions at the organization’s congress. Certainly in the 1920s this issue was significant for party leaders, who considered the Bund as what we would today call a ‘player’ in the socialist world arena, not merely a local political organization. In 1921 the Bund joined the Vienna International Working Union of Socialist Parties, the so-called ‘Second-and-a-Half International,’ dissolved two years later. It then joined the Paris-based Information Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Parties, which also represented the non-Communist ‘revolutionary socialists.’ Neither the Vienna nor the Paris body, however, had much influence on the European workers’ movements.6 The tsveyer believed that joining the Second International was a betrayal of faith. Leon Fayner was a Bundist who later, in wartime Warsaw, became the head of the Bund’s Central Committee on the Aryan side; together with the Left Labor Zionist Adolf Berman he brought Jan Karski into the ghetto in 1942 to see at first hand what it was like. Fayner described the Second International as a coalition of parliamentary democrats for whom the International was ‘the only means of realizing socialism.’ Its ideology consisted of ‘compromises and opportunism, the ideology of slow, gradualist and peaceful social

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evolution integrating itself into the capitalist system.’ The two sides, he continued, ‘revolutionary socialism and compromise-socialism,’ are both theoretically and practically at odds with each other, effectively two worlds in conflict.7 Such complaints – and Fayner was not the only important Bundist to voice them – were hard to swallow for a party that by and large shared the principles of the tsveyer. Yes, the eynsers acknowledged, we are indeed revolutionary socialists. We dislike the reformist ideology of the majority of members of the International. We condemn the often anemic policies of the organization. But we must not simply stand on the sidelines and criticize; we must actively cooperate with the other revolutionary parties within the International to shape and modify those policies. Victor Alter had advocated the Bund’s entry into the International for a long time. From a ‘revolutionary Marxist’ position he argued against the tsveyer. ‘Our revolutionary creed,’ he wrote, obliges us not to wait, but to involve ourselves actively in order to help change the world. That is after all the ruling principle of our socialist activism. Within the international context we can do so only from within the Socialist International. Individuals, small groups and factions may permit themselves the luxury of waiting, perhaps for many years, but a mass movement cannot wait forever. It must fight; otherwise it ceases to have a political existence.8 The eynser, then, were first and foremost pragmatists, and they believed in practical politics. In this respect they shared what I would consider the fundamental ethos of the Bund, internal disputes notwithstanding. (Alter, incidentally, opposed ‘reformism’ both within and outside the Bund for quite some time.9) Personal insults or ad hominem arguments rarely found their way into these disputes between ‘left’ and ‘right’; the Leninist principle, ‘He who is not with us is against us,’ never held sway. With rare exceptions such disagreements were expressed more in sorrow than in anger. The tsveyer warned the eynser that they were underestimating ‘the serious danger’ of reformist influences. Should the Bund join the International, wrote one of the leaders of the tsveyer, Y. Khmurner, ‘those influences, hitherto seeping into the ranks of the Bund through narrow apertures,’ would ‘pour in through open doors and windows.’10 After the Bund took the decision to join the LSI in 1930, the left wing of the party – consisting of perhaps 40 per cent of its members – asked for

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permission to publish its own journal. The Central Committee of the Bund gave it its blessing, and by late 1930 the journal, called Kegn shtrom (Against the Current), made its appearance, and continued to be published for nearly seven years. Kegn shtrom was a remarkable phenomenon. To the best of my knowledge, at a time when most socialist parties were riven by factionalism, usually categorized as right and left wing, no other socialist party granted such permission to one of its factions. This, too, is testimony as to the profoundly democratic norms that pervaded the party. What were the central disagreements between Left and Right? Here, roughly speaking, are the major issues of contention, drawn from the Bundist press, including Kegn shtrom and the publication of the eynser, Sotsialistishe bleter, only one issue of which apparently appeared, in July 1931. The first concerned the ‘path to socialism.’ Both the eynser and the tsveyer believed in class warfare and in the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the eynser, however, ‘proletarian dictatorship’ meant the eventual domination of the majority of the population – the workers – over the bourgeoisie, a domination that would come into being as the power of the bourgeoisie became attenuated, and would last for a short time – that is, until the hold of the bourgeoisie was decisively broken. With an eye on the experience of Russia, the eynser affirmed that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would not be that of one party over the others, and that freedom of speech and democratic norms in general would be maintained in the ‘socialist camp.’ In the words of Victor Alter, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ meant both disempowering the bourgeoisie after the revolution and building ‘a new system and a new life within the secure rule of law.’ This must take place ‘under the full control from below over institutions of power,’ and could only be guaranteed by ‘freedom of speech, print, associations, and so on.’ Once you began to restrict these freedoms, warned Alter, as ‘they have been by the Communists,’ ‘quantity turns into quality’ – that is, temporary restrictions acquire the force of law. Even under the conditions of a dictatorship, the opposition (and Alter had, of course, in mind the socialist opposition) must be given the full opportunity to ‘make an input into the political life of the country.’ 11 The Left spurned the Soviet version, too, considering it a deformation of socialism, but it also rejected the ‘reformist’ path as one of submission to capitalism if not an outright betrayal of the party’s socialist principles. Khmurner and others professed faith in democracy, but not in the ‘fetish’ of democracy when it became no

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more than a means of stabilizing capitalism. Revolutionary socialists, Khmurner wrote, are convinced that ‘democracy today is merely a weapon of the bourgeois power establishment . . . the road to revolutionary transformation of society . . . can be achieved only by a proletarian dictatorship.’12 Unlike the eynser, the tsveyer were not too concerned with theoretical hairsplitting on this subject: by and large their interpretation was the same as the Communists’. The second major point of contention was Soviet Russia. By the end of the 1920s individual Bundists such as Alter and Erlich had already rejected most of the principles of communism. Over a period of several years the eynser became increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union, opposing not only the Communist Party as an organization, but more broadly the ideology and practice of communism. The left wing, by contrast, retained its sympathy for the Soviet Union for many years, praising the five-year plans and criticizing the ‘Right’ Mensheviks for their staunch and uncompromising opposition to the Communist regime. ‘I can understand anything,’ Khmurner wrote to his brother, ‘with one exception: How can a socialist undermine, by word or by deed, Soviet Russia! One can find fault, one should not whitewash anything, but one must always write as someone who belongs to the same camp.’13 Neither Khmurner nor other tsveyer were uncritical toward the Soviet Union. But as late as 1933 they continued to condemn the Mensheviks. Leyvik Hodes, a prominent Bund activist and one of the editors of the Bundist daily, the Naye folkstsaytung, wrote that hatred of the workers’ state was the food and drink of the Mensheviks. In the first ten years after the revolution, the Mensheviks continued to muster support. The adoption of the new Soviet constitution, however, signaled their swan song. In Russia today the most important elements of a socialist social order are being created. The Menshevik program, with its presumptive restoration of capitalism and political democracy, is losing favor among leaders of the socialist movement.14 These words were written in 1934, after the twin policies of collectivization and forced industrialization had cost the lives of millions of people, and after the first wave of purges in 1931 had numbered among its victims a large number of Mensheviks. The left-wing Bundists’ dislike of the Mensheviks, in fact, was so strong that they even failed to condemn the trial of 14 prominent Menshevik leaders in March 1931.

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The eynser and tsveyer debated other issues as well. One was the Bund’s relationship with the Polish socialists, whom the tsveyer damned root and branch as traitors to socialism and as rabid nationalists. Another was whether or not the Bund should participate in elections within the Jewish community to bodies such as the Jewish community councils (kehiles). Here there were differences among the eynser, too: thus the de facto leader of this faction, Khmurner, was strongly in favor of the Bund participating in the kehile elections and thus gaining more followers in the Jewish community. Typically, the pragmatic argument won – i.e., the Bund must not shun any opportunity to influence potential constituents. The 1936 elections to these bodies did indeed bring many Bundists into this institution.15 One issue that overwhelmingly united the eynser and the tsveyer was the Bund’s national program – that is, the demand for ‘national cultural autonomy,’ worked out in the early years of the twentieth century, and pursued consistently in Czarist Russia and then in independent Poland. Khmurner, perhaps the most fervent leader of the ‘tsveyer,’ was equally fervent in defending Yiddish schools and other institutions in the Yiddish language.16 For several years, he was the head of TSYSHO – the organization of Yiddish secular schools in Poland. He also often criticized the Soviet Communists for their hypocritical espousal of Yiddish, pointing out that this policy lacked any consistency, and was completely subordinated to the Communists’ political goals.17

To summarize: First, differences of opinion and policy between the two factions coexisted side by side with a profound conviction that they must not be permitted to split the party. This was the single most impressive legitimation of the Bund. Leon Oler, editor of a book about Khmurner and the tsveyer and himself an active member of the faction, concluded that all ‘battles . . . were fought . . . with a steady concern for the fate, the growth and the influence of the party as a whole,’ and in this he was surely correct.18 Clearly, the Bund had a dualistic streak, as borne out both by the longtime split between the right and the left wings, as well as by the complex ideological character of each of these factions. For many years a not insignificant number of Bundists failed to see any organic link between the nature of the Soviet Union and the communist policy of the Comintern or the communists in Poland. This resulted in the often curious attitude of hostility towards the local Communist Party combined

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with a tendency to overlook some of the same – if not indeed worse – features in the Comintern, or in the Soviet Union, on the ground that they were ‘temporary’ deformations bound, eventually, to disappear. In the early 1920s the Communist offensive against the Bund included physical attacks, sometimes with weapons such as knives, pistols, and axes. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the label ‘social fascists’ was affixed to all socialist parties, who were deemed worse than ‘ordinary’ fascists, these Communist attacks increased in intensity. The Bund understood the nature of their opponents full well. It is not certain, however, that all Bundists understood the connection between terror on the streets of Warsaw and terror in Russia, where socialism had long ceased to have meaning. Despite the growth of democracy within the Bund, and despite the gradually diminishing sectarianism, old illusions lingered for a long time. The Moscow show trials of the 1930s, the intensification of terror within Russia, Stalin’s terror against all Communist parties who refused blindly to follow their Moscow master, including the Polish Communist Party dissolved in 1938, and Moscow’s role in the Spanish Civil War all contributed to the waning of the tsveyer. Their influence also waned as a result of the Bund’s internal evolution, especially the gradual growth of pragmatic, as opposed to dogmatic, considerations. It became increasingly bizarre to champion open-mindedness and tolerance with regard to the Bund’s growing constituency and its need to form a joint front with the PPS, while disregarding the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, some of the Bundists who managed to flee to the United States and other countries stayed loyal to the memory of Khmurner and of the role that the left wing played in independent Poland. The legacy of the tsveyer, however, became gradually dissipated. What remained was the pride of those who had participated in this chapter of the Bund’s history, and the pride shared by the Bund as a whole that yet another threat to the party’s cherished mishpokhedikayt was so successfully overcome.

Notes * A longer version of this chapter will appear in Polin. The author is grateful

to Messrs Maius Nowogrodzki and Motl Zelmanowicz – himself a former tsveyer – for their valuable help in writing this chapter.

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1. On the ‘Twenty-One Points,’ see F. Borkenau, World Communism – A History of the Communist International (New York, 1939), pp. 195–7. 2. See J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1918–1925,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. IV, ed. S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1972), pp. 89–119. 3. The memoirs were made available to me by Novogrudski’s son, Maius Nowogrodzki. 4. Cited by J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1926–1932,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. V (New York, 1981), p. 65. 5. Ibid., p. 67. 6. For details on the Vienna Union, see G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. IV, part 1 (London, 1958), pp. 337–42, and vol. IV, part 2, pp. 680–4. 7. Hertz, ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1926–1932,’ op. cit., p. 68. 8. Ibid., p. 66. 9. For details, see A. Erlikh, ‘Di lebnsgeshikhte fun viktor alter,’ in Henryk erlikh un viktor alter (New York, 1951), pp. 53–80; and A. Jaeschke, ‘Mysl polityczna Wiktora Altera z latach 1933–1935,’ Z pola walki, 21 (1988), 46–64. 10. Hertz, ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln, 1926–1932,’ op. cit., p. 68. 11. V. Alter, ‘Demokratye un diktatur,’ Unzer tsayt, 4 (May 1932), 15–20. 12. Y. Khmurner, ‘Undzer veg,’ Kegn shtrom, 4 (November 1931), 4. 13. Cited by S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], ‘Yoysef leshtshinski – zayn lebn un shafn,’ in Khmurner-bukh (New York, 1958), p. 150. 14. Kegn shtrom (June 1934). 15. For the background to the Bund’s policy on the kehiles, and the change that resulted in the victory of the Bund in 1936, see R. M. Shapiro, ‘The Polish Kehilla Elections of 1936: A Revolution Re-examined,’ Polin, VIII (1994). 16. I am grateful to Motl Zelmanowicz of New York for bringing this important matter to my attention. 17. See his ‘Ven di praktik is tsekrigt mit der teorye,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 348 (November 16, 1934), 5–6. Khmurner was equally scathing about the attitude of the Polish Communists. In an article called ‘Our Objections to You,’ Folkstsaytung, 94 (October 6, 1922), 3–4, he charges the Communists with intolerance, demagogy, and indifference to the cultural needs of the Jewish worker. 18. L. Oler (Probus), ‘Di linke rikhtung (“tsveyer”) in bund fun poyln,’ in Khmurner-bukh, op. cit., p. 11.

8 The Bund Organization in Lodz, 1898–1939 Pawel Samus´

´

The history of the Bund in Lodz has never been of major interest to historians and therefore has not become the subject of a monograph so far. There is only one exception to this – a book written by a Party activist.1 Polish historians have hitherto mentioned this issue only in passing. It should be stated, however, that the history of the Bund is a very interesting one, which – for a number of reasons – deserves thorough research, the results of which ought to be presented to contemporary readers. It should also be added that Lodz enjoyed a particular position in respect to the Party. It was the place where one of the most active Bund organizations (in the Polish territories) was established. Lodz was a major center of industry and of the working class. It was also a city that evolved into a fascinating conglomerate of nations and social strata, cultures and religions. The city constituted a major Jewish center in Poland, and consequently it was a focus of the political, economic and cultural life of the Jews. Thus, the description of facts and historical developments involving the Lodz Bund organization and the presentation of leading Party activists will contribute to an understanding of some complex processes and mutual relationships among different national and social groups in this multi-ethnic as well as multi-cultural city. The origins of the Bund in Lodz date back to the end of 1897 and the beginning of 1898. At that time, soon after the founding Congress of the Party (October 1897), emissaries of the Bund’s leadership arrived in Lodz in order to create organizational units in the region. The emissaries included such experienced Party members as Avrom Mutnik (Mutnikovitsh), who had belonged to the so-called Vilna Social Democratic Group and was a co-founder and member of the Bund’s first Central Committee (CC), Roza Grinblat from Bialystok, who had 90

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been a delegate to the founding Congress of the Party, Boris Frumkin from Minsk, and Yitzkhok Peysakhzon from Warsaw. Thanks to their concerted efforts, the loosely organized pre-existing ‘group’ in Lodz was converted into the Bund Lodz Committee (LC). Soon afterwards (July 1898), however, the Russian police struck a painful blow to the newly created organization and arrested its 18 members in Lodz. The total number of Bundists arrested at that time in active Party centers by the Czar’s police amounted to scores of its members.2 However, the process of reconstructing the Party’s units started anew shortly after these arrests and the local workers’ and intellectuals’ efforts were assisted by emissaries sent by the Party leadership. The Lodz organization started to be active. Sheyne Reyzl Segal, who had previously been involved in work in Vilna and Bialystok, is likely to have represented the Bund Lodz organization at the Bund’s Second Congress (September 1898), while at the next Congress (1899) the Lodz organization was represented by Tsivia Hurvitsh. This eminent member of the Bund, its co-founder and a member of the CC, was active in Warsaw and Lodz, where she worked at the Party’s underground printing house, in which Di arbeyter shtimme, official journal of the Party, was printed. Local members also started to play a growing role in the Lodz organization. This autochthonous element was represented by Shamay Vaysenblum, delegate to the Fifth Congress of the Socialist International in Paris (1900), or by the baker Moyshe Konopnitski. The Bund pioneers in the ‘Polish Manchester’, as Lodz was called at that time, were destined to work in a very difficult situation. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries Lodz was the biggest industrial center and the most prominent gathering of the working class in the Polish Kingdom. It was also the second biggest urban center, after Warsaw, in what later became independent Poland. At the same time, the Jews constituted the largest ethnic minority in the area of Lodz. The census of 1897 shows that out of 314 000 permanent city residents the Jews constituted 29.4 percent of the population (92 400), the Poles amounted to 46 percent (145 600), while Germans made up 21.4 percent (67 300). In the following years, the number of Jews inhabiting the city grew constantly. Historians estimate that at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the Jewish industrial and craft proletariat in the city of Lodz and its region amounted to approximately 11–12 percent of all proletarians, the Poles to about 57 percent, and Germans to 25 percent, while the rest was composed of workers representing different other nationalities. In 1901, industry

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employed about 67 000 workers, while in 1913 about 93 000 workers were employed in industry and over 20 000 in various forms of craft.3 At the end of the nineteenth century Jewish workers were employed mostly as textile handicraft-product weavers in small factories or in private home-housed workshops run by weaver-foremen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, along with the crisis of this form of production, an influx of Jewish workers into the textile industry could be observed. They tended to find jobs mostly in small companies. The Jews used to be employed in craft workshops and in commerce. Unskilled Jews would accept even the most degrading and physically demanding manual work. The Jewish proletariat’s living and working conditions at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century were determined by the backward social regulations of the Czarist Empire, low incomes, lack of working-time regulations and healthcare, appalling housing and, finally, an acute lack of food and proper clothing. The Jewish proletariat was exposed, even more than other Jewish strata, to anti-Semitism and suffered from social oppression and discrimination (for example, in the sphere of employment), especially on the part of their own company administrations and employers, who, in cases of conflict with the workers, were supported not only by the police but also by the Jewish religious hierarchy. For many years, the Jewish proletarians in Lodz kept their distance from their Christian fellow-workers. That attitude stemmed from differences in religion, customs and language. The gap between the two groups became wider when, during the general strike in Lodz (the so-called Lodz Rebellion of May 1892), which degenerated into bloodshed following the Russian authorities’ intervention, a pogrom against the Jews occurred in the city. For many years following those developments, the Jewish city inhabitants, and especially those who belonged to the least wealthy group, did not associate the May strike with social demonstrations but associated it with anti-Semitic unrest. A psychological factor – fear of any political and social activities whatsoever, which was caused by a concern that it might bring upon the Jewish minority repressive actions on the part not only of the Czar’s authorities but also of the Christian population – hampered the Jewish groups’ fight against the ruling political regime and against social oppression. For a number of years, both a feeling of apathy and a fear of repression prevailed among the Polish working class. It prevented the Polish political parties from engaging in new activities. However, the

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fear of possible repressive measures and pogroms which was present in the Jewish minority was so great that it often paralyzed the efforts of the first Bund activists in Lodz.4 In 1901 the activists finally managed to re-establish the LC of the Bund. This should be regarded, of course, as a success not only of the local activists but also of the above-mentioned Tsivia Hurvitsh, who, on behalf of the CC, maintained communication with specific groups in the Polish Kingdom. At the end of 1901 or at the beginning of 1902, as was later confirmed by a police investigation, the LC consisted of two teachers, Ester and Khana Lipshits; a midwife, Sheyne Elman; a weaver, Berek Vinograd, and a shoemaker, Pinkhes Kalkshteyn. Other Party members included a bookkeeper, Mikhael Birentsvayg; a teacher, Eda Hirshfeld; weavers, Moyshe Leyb, Yisroel Kushinski, Hershel Piekhman, Shlama Birenshtok, Litman Rubinshtayn and Avrom Miedziogorski; bakers, Shmuel Peyzner, Yisroel Shluker, Dovid Tarlo; painters, Yitzkhok Goldmakher and Yankl Kashe; a bookbinder, Khayim Rosen; a locksmith, Fayvel Gdanski; and a maid, Dobra Dimant. They were young. The majority of them were 18–20 years old. The young generation of local craftworkers (for example, weavers, shoemakers, tailors, stocking-makers, bakers, carpenters and painters), and employees of small and medium-sized textile companies, were also represented among Bund members in Lodz. In addition, numerous members of the local Jewish intelligentsia (for instance, clerks and teachers) and the older students attending local secondary schools were closely connected with the Party. The LC of the Bund also played a certain role in nearby cities, such as Pabianice and Zgierz. The number of Party members grew constantly and the total of membership fees doubled by 1902. The development of the organization in Lodz was slowed down by repeated repressive police actions. On March 17, 1903, the police arrested 37 people on a charge of belonging to the Bund in the city of Lodz; soon other arrests followed. Police actions, aimed at arresting Party members, troubled the Lodz organization over the following months. As many as 130 people were detained and charged with being active members of the Party on February 26, 1904. After each blow struck by the police, however, those who avoided incarceration or were released from prison managed to rebuild Party structures. This was achieved thanks to the strong support given by active Party members. According to the Bund’s report compiled in the summer of 1904, the Party had 700 organized workers, while the information available in one memoir indicates that, at that time, the core of

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the Bund comprised 200 members.5 They could rely on the assistance of a (two or three times) larger Party-supporting group. As far as the number of Party members is concerned, the Bund was in second place after the PPS and was larger than the SDKPiL. It is worth remembering that during the pre-revolution period the membership of the socialist parties in the Polish Kingdom was made up solely of hardcore activists and managed to include a small fraction (approximately 1–1.5 percent) of the proletariat. At that time, the influence exerted by a party depended on the activity of the organization, and on the efficiency and commitment of its members. Lodz activists of the Bund excelled in these respects. In winter and autumn the Bund’s agitators used to organize meetings and so-called wieczorynki (evening gatherings) in Party members’ and supporters’ apartments, while in spring and summer they would meet in nearby woods. The gatherings were sometimes attended by hundreds of participants. Speeches would be delivered, songs sung, leaflets read and distributed. The latter would also be circulated in numerous other places. Between 1901 and 1902 the Lodz Bund’s periodical, Der frayhayts-glok, was printed in the city, as were a number of leaflets. Bund members also circulated other periodicals (e.g. Poslednie izvestiia, Der bund, Przysz´los´c´ ), pamphlets, and proclamations in Yiddish, Russian and Polish. During those agitating campaigns, the circulated materials put stress on the role of class struggle, appealed to the Jewish proletariat to join forces with the workers of other nations in order to start political struggle (by means of strikes, demonstrations and other forms of defiance towards the Russian state authorities), to overthrow the Czar’s despotic regime, and to create a democratic constitutional republic in Russia. The agitators explained that the democratic system would guarantee political freedom and equal rights for all nationalities – thereby, giving the Jewish minority national and cultural autonomy – which, in turn, would lay the foundations for the creation of a future socialist society. Similarly, they would appeal for improvement in the economic status of the Jewish proletariat, encouraging the workers to organize strikes and call for a rise in their incomes as well as a limit on the working day (down to ten hours, and setting eight hours as a long-term target). At meetings, they would advocate the creation of strike funds and the collection of money for that purpose. Police reports claimed that among Bund members and supporters some advocated using ‘economic terror’ as a weapon. In 1902, the police recorded instances where this was used against the employers in the craft sector as well as in a textile firm. Bund activists organized effective demonstrations in the streets of Lodz and in many other public places. In 1899–1902, for instance,

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they arranged a number of demonstrations at funerals of socialist activists, which included both Polish and Jewish workers. Beginning in 1900, they annually celebrated May Day, holding festive gatherings and meetings and circulating leaflets. In January 1903, they arranged two anti-Czar demonstrations in Lodz theaters, one in that of Frederic Sellin and the other in the ‘Thalia’ theater. On March 14 of the same year, in the center of the city, they organized a rally attended by hundreds of participants, to protest against the pogrom in Kishinev. Both in Lodz and in other cities, Party activists organized special hiring fairs, called gie´lda (in Russian: birzhe). Initially, these fairs gathered those who were looking for employment. With the passage of time, however, they evolved into meetings of Party members and supporters. The participants would listen to agitators’ appeals, take part in discussions, and receive periodicals and leaflets. Bund activists tended to organize the meetings in the city center’s busiest streets (such as Wschodnia Street). The gatherings would often develop into street demonstrations and fights with the police. In the autumn of 1904, with a gradual increase in revolutionary tension in Lodz, open anti-Czar demonstrations, organized by other socialist parties as well as the Bund, became more and more frequent. Bund members first carried out a propaganda campaign to defend the social-democratic activists Marcin Kasprzak and Benedykt Gurcman, who were tried by court martial in Warsaw, and members subsequently staged a protest demonstration. They also participated in the anti-mobilization campaign which was conducted by other socialist parties. They prepared widely circulated leaflets protesting against conscription into the Czar’s armed forces. On December 3, 1904, in the center of the city of Lodz, they staged an anti-mobilization protest, and they joined similar demonstrations organized by PPS activists.6 During the pre-revolution period, Bund activists set up closer links with the SDKPiL. This cooperation originated from efforts to organize joint demonstrations and rallies, and sometimes from the issuing of joint appeals. The local committees of both parties are likely to have come to an agreement concerning their cooperation in various organizational and printing activities. Bund members assisted the Social Democrats in re-creating their organizational structure, which was destroyed by police arrests in 1903. The organizations jointly set up the United Committee of the Red Cross, whose task was to provide financial help for political prisoners and exiles as well as their families. However, differences between the activists of these parties also appeared. The Social Democrats were critically disposed towards the

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Bund’s demand that the Jews be granted national cultural autonomy because they considered it to be a sign of the Party’s separatist tendencies and a deviation from the principle of internationalism. Additional complications were created by the position adopted by Bund activists, who regarded themselves as the only representatives of the Jewish proletariat and denied other socialist organizations the right to represent Jewish workers, while, at the same time, not only SDKPiL but also PPS members were making attempts to organize party structures amongst the Jewish proletariat.7 The Zionist movement, which was active in the area of Lodz, also competed for influence over the Jewish workers. Its program, concepts, and activities were strongly opposed by Bund members. They themselves, in turn, were attacked by the Jewish religious hierarchy and bourgeoisie, not only for the Bund’s advocacy of strikes in factories, but also for the Bund’s educational actions, carried out amongst the Jewish poor. From the first days of the revolution of 1905–7 in Lodz onwards, Jewish workers, along with their Polish and German counterparts, participated in street fights, demonstrations and rallies. They took part in street battles with the police and armed forces, and demanded an improvement of living conditions, democratization of the political system, and the introduction of civil rights. They were also prepared, if necessary, to shed their blood. They stood shoulder to shoulder, beginning with the first street clashes, through the May Day demonstrations and the so-called ‘fight for factories,’ up until the barricade fight (June 22–4, 1905).8 Jewish workers found themselves in the front line of the fighting proletariat. The highest percentage of casualties among the victims of the Lodz workers’ – fierce, but uneven – fight with the police and armed forces was sustained by Jews: over 52 per cent out of the 151 dead were Jewish. A high percentage of the 234 wounded who were listed in the official announcement of casualties were probably also Jewish.9 The heroic acts of those days were later pronounced to have been the climax of the Jewish mass working-class movement during the revolution.10 Bund activists together with members of other socialist parties, confused as they were by the spontaneous outbreak and size of the general strike, made attempts to join the political and economic fight from its very beginning. They organized rallies and meetings, circulated periodicals and appeals, informed people about the latest developments in the Polish Kingdom and Russia, and helped the strikers to formulate demands targeted at their employers (e.g. limitation of working hours,

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pay raises, fair treatment of the workers, introduction of a healthcare system). At rallies and in leaflets they advocated a united fight of the Jewish workers and the proletariat of the multinational Russian state to overthrow the Czar’s regime and to build on its ruins a democratic republic which would guarantee the implementation of social reform, the introduction of civil rights, equality of all nationalities, and Jewish national cultural autonomy. Despite some antagonism over programs, principles, and tactics which surfaced among socialist activists, the SDKPiL and PPS in Lodz cooperated with each other and with the Bund in many political demonstrations and in economic actions. Cooperation was particularly clearly visible during the January–February general strike and the celebration of May Day (Bund and SDKPiL representatives entered into an agreement on this issue), when they arranged so-called majówki (May picnics) in nearby forests. They also organized demonstrations at the funerals of the victims of the battles with the police and the military (May–June 1905). In the ‘days of June,’ Bund activists and members of other socialist parties showed mutual solidarity, and later, together defended barricades in the streets of Lodz. Bund fighters demonstrated indomitable courage in battle against the police and armed forces. Later on, the socialists staged a protest against the plan to set up the Bulygin Duma (parliament) announced by the Czar’s authorities (August 21–22, 1905). In October and November they organized the fighting of the Lodz proletariat during a large-scale general strike called at that time. After the outbreak of the Moscow military uprising, they proclaimed – as did activists of all other socialist parties in the Polish Kingdom – a general solidarity strike (December 27, 1905), and the Bund and PPS appealed to the workers to prepare themselves for a military fight against the Czar’s authorities. During that action, however, there surfaced another disagreement among the socialists. When the leaders of the Bund called for a termination of the strike (December 31), the leaders of the SDKPiL and PPS advocated that it should continue for another three days.11 The quick development of revolutionary events led tens of thousands of Lodz inhabitants to involve themselves in the political life of those stormy times. The greatest activity was displayed by the workers, who flocked to join parties and trade unions, which were developing at a frantic pace and transforming into mass organizations. The revolutionary events, together with the unusual atmosphere in the autumn of 1905, were a breakthrough in that process. Over the following months (September 1905 to October 1906) approximately 40 000 people joined the socialist parties, while about 10 000 more

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entered into other workers’ solidarity groups (the National Workers’ Union, the Christian Democrats). Local socialist organizations were the fastest growing group in the Polish Kingdom, though they also developed rapidly in other centers.12 The Bund in Lodz grew dynamically and augmented the list of its members several times over. In autumn 1906, according to Party reports, the Lodz Bund core organization consisted of 1600 members. At that time, in the whole Russian Empire, the number of Party members amounted to between 33 000 and 40 000.13 In Lodz, Bund activists created a centralized organization which was skillfully managed by the LC – the Lodz Social Democratic Bund Committee – which signed leaflets, membership fee receipts etc. Inside the organization, a prominent role was played by a core group of ‘professional revolutionaries,’ which, apart from delegates sent by the CC of the Bund (for instance, Tsivia Hurvitsh who came to Lodz once again, and Yisroel Likhtenshtayn, who arrived in Lodz from Warsaw), consisted of eminent local activists (intellectuals such as Dovid Mazo, Ignatz Kokotzinski and workers like Vaysenblum). They constituted the organization’s managing group, set up new Party units, and supervised political actions and economic strikes. Lodz Bund activists spared no effort to reach not only various working-class circles but also the students (for example they created a Bund students’ organization). They continued to be effective in publishing and distributing central as well as local Party periodicals and leaflets in Yiddish, Polish and Russian. The latter were circulated among the soldiers of the local garrison.14 Bund activists also started to set up trade union branches. At the end of November and the beginning of December of 1905, eight Bund unions were created, for textile workers, tradesmen, tailors and capmakers, bakers, butchers, stocking makers, metal- and woodworkers, and servants. Initially, they carried out their activities semilegally. Soon, however, they went underground in order to avoid repressive actions directed against them by the police. Nevertheless, the job of organizing a trade union structure was not terminated. In February 1906, Lodz Bund trade unions contained 4341 members, slightly higher than the comparable figure for Warsaw. Initially, the Bundist unions were closely connected with the Party, but after the introduction of regulations governing trade unions and associations in Russia (March 17, 1906), Bund union activists decided to eliminate the principle of Party membership in order to legalize their trade union activities. Two Bund textile workers’ trade unions (which, in

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May 1906, had approximately 2000 members, including 500 women) and a tradesmen’s union were registered in December 1906 in Lodz, and a month later started their legal activities. In the summer of 1907, there were nine legal, local, Bund trade unions which had approximately 3500 members. At that time in Lodz, the total number of legal trade unions amounted to 76 and they had over 85 000 members. The largest Bund trade unions were the following: the Textile Workers’ Professional Association (1200 members), which was headed by Vaysenblum; the Industrial and Trade Company Workers’ Professional Association (730 members); and the Building Industry Workers’ Professional Association (400 members). Economic, financial, cultural and library sections, information and employment agencies and an arbitration court were also created and linked to the trade union structures. Bund trade union members were very active in the textile workers’, craftworkers’ and tradesmen’s economic fight. They took part in negotiations and related means of settling arguments over pay rises and improvement of working conditions, which, of course, tended to break out between the workers and employers. They put effort into giving financial support to the striking workers, and to trade unionists who were poor, ill, or imprisoned, by using the unions’ financial resources to pay allowances. They also assisted the unemployed in finding jobs. They spared no effort to conduct cultural and educational activities, . such as opening up the Zród´l o bookshop and the musical and theatrical society Harfa, in order to stimulate the intellectual development of the working environment in Lodz.15 During the years of the revolution, the Bund evolved into a full-fledged socialist political party of the Jewish proletariat. Its activists had demonstrated a knack for organizing revolutionary actions and the ability to arrange and to manage a mass movement. The Bund, it was said at that time, dominated ‘the Jewish street.’ Other groups, however, also competed with one another to exert influence upon the Jewish proletariat in Lodz. Organization and propaganda activities were conducted by the Zionist-Socialist Workers’ Party (SS) and by the Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party Poalei-Zion (ESDRP-PZ). Small anarchist groups also accentuated their presence by means of propaganda campaign and terrorist attempts. Both the PPS and the SDKPiL had organizational structures made up of Jewish proletarians and based on city districts, each of them having hundreds of members. The rivalry for influence over the Jewish masses caused complications in the socialist camp. Differences arose between the Bund and the SDKPiL even more often when, after the unity

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congress of the RSDRP (April–May 1906), both of these parties were granted autonomy. The differences in attitude, program, and organization between the activists of the Bund and of the SDKPiL in Lodz concerned local problems and were also a reflection of the overarching parties’ relations.16 Despite arguments and disagreements, Bund and SDKPiL activists cooperated many times in workers’ political campaigns and in economic struggles in the city of Lodz. Parties of the socialist camp initiated concerted actions to change the workers’ awareness and to shape the political culture of the multinational proletariat of Lodz. Thanks to the energetic propaganda and organization conducted by the socialists, which included the establishment of workers’ self-defense squads (the Lodz Bund organization, for instance had three such self-defense groups), the many attempts made in 1905–6 to instigate pogroms against the Jews were aborted.17 Although in Lodz the efforts to avoid an outbreak of ‘fratricidal’ fights (i.e. large-scale terror directed against political opponents) failed, the bloody rivalry was finally terminated thanks to the initiative of the workers’ and socialist parties.18 In the second year of the revolution, the role of the Party, which succeeded in establishing itself as an efficient organizer and leader of the mass political fight, grew even more important. Activists of the Bund and other socialist groups took part in preparing and supervising mass political strikes. In 1906 there were seven strikes in Lodz, and in 1907 there were another three such actions in the city. They also organized other similar actions, demonstrations, rallies and meetings, and continued to circulate leaflets. During the election campaign for the Duma (Russian parliament), Bund activists conducted an intensive action aimed at fostering the political education of the proletariat. The election to the First Duma was boycotted by the Bund and other socialist groups in the Russian state. The Party denounced the boycott, however, when the election to the Second Duma was announced. In Lodz, at that time, Bund and SDKPiL representatives set up the Social Democratic Election Committee. The list of candidates endorsed by both of these parties won in the workers’ ‘curia’ (electoral group) in Lodz (January 25, 1907). The Czar’s authorities, however, canceled the election results. During the election to the Third Duma, activists of the local organizations of the Bund, the SDKPiL and the PPS-Left allied to cast their collective votes for mutually agreed upon candidates in particular factories. As a result, the election of plenipotentiaries to the urban curiae (September 1, 1907) was a victory for the socialist camp: 52

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representatives of the SDKPiL, 25 of the PPS-Left, and 3 of the Bund were elected. Bund and SDKPiL activists cooperated in the election to the Lodz urban curiae (October 14, 1907), but they managed to play only a minor role.19 Employers from Lodz decided to restore the pre-revolution state of affairs and to dispose of rebellious workers; they announced the ‘great lockout’ (December 1906 to March 1907). About 100 000 people were deprived of the means of survival. The determined workers were supported by socialist activists. Some of them belonged to the Bund and were included in the Inter-Party and Inter-Union Lockout Commission. The lockout ended in a victory for the factory owners.20 After the defeat of the revolution, political life in Lodz was suppressed and the pre-revolution state of affairs was successfully restored in the factories of Lodz. Police repression managed to crush the socialist parties, trade unions and other workers’ associations. The Lodz Bund organization was almost entirely destroyed during massive arrests at the end of 1907 and 1908. The police continued to persecute Bund activists and succeeded in paralyzing any attempts to re-create Party structures. The Bund together with other socialist parties receded to its pre-revolution membership and organizational structure.21 However, the changes which had taken place in the awareness of the workers could not be nullified. The workers could not be deprived of their feeling of importance, power, and political competence. A whole chapter in the history of these changes and the Jewish workers’ fight for emancipation was written by Bund activists. For a number of years following the defeat of the revolution, Bund activists failed to undertake any large-scale political action. Local activists were assisted in their work by delegates sent by the Party leadership, like Sasha Tshemeriski (1911) or Avrom Khayfets (1913). However, after what was usually a short period of work, they would often fall into the hands of the police. In 1911, Yisroel Likhtenshtayn, a twenty-sevenyear-old teacher and experienced activist from Warsaw, came once again to Lodz. He took the post of headmaster of the school for deaf children. From that moment on, he established himself in the city and became a committed member of the local Bundist structures.22 At that time, Bund members could conduct activities legally in cultural and educational institutions and in trade unions. Out of the nine Bund trade unions, only two survived the repression – those of the textile workers’ and the tailors’, but at the end of 1910 these unions had a mere 144 members. After a few years, other trade unions were re-created, such as those of the bakers, paper- and wood-workers. The authorities, however, dissolved

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the textile workers’ trade union in 1913. While the total number of Bund trade union members grew at some points, it never exceeded one-sixth of the number during the revolution.23 It was not until July 1912, during the elections for the Fourth Duma, that political life in Lodz was re-enlivened. Bund members who favored creating a close electoral alliance with the SDKPiL and PPS-Left took an active part in these developments. However, unlike in Warsaw, where the Bundists allied with PPS-Left activists, the attempts at cooperation in Lodz fell through. The socialist parties won a victory in the election of plenipotentiaries to the Lodz workers’ curia (October 1, 1912), and the Bund candidate, the weaver Jacob Oberman, won one of the seven mandates to the city electoral council.24 After the outbreak of the First World War, Bund activists circulated anti-war materials in Lodz. Bund members also joined various commissions and councils which were set up to coordinate the activities of the socialist parties, trade unions and other organizations. They helped the workers of Lodz, whose living conditions worsened considerably due to the halt in production at that time. In August 1914 the InterTrade Union Commission was established in the city of Lodz, and in September of the same year the Inter-Party Workers’ Council was set up. The Bund was represented there by Dovid Shvartsman and Avrom Shmoysh. Harmonious cooperation in the council lasted until the end of 1915, when the council was dissolved because of growing arguments among the socialist parties over tactics and political measures. The Bund trade unions (for instance those of the textile workers, ribbon industry workers, and silk and wool-weaving factory workers, bakers and confectioners, painters, butchers, and tailors) managed to develop their activities during the war years, although they had only a limited number of members. Their representatives would become members of the Inter-Trade Union Commission, which delegated its representatives to different departments of the Chief Civil Committee (that dealt, in turn, with various aspects of city life during the war). Bundists worked first of all in the Civil Committee for the Assistance to the Poor (Shiya Presman, Avrom Shmoysh, Moyshe Zeliger) and City Provisions Committee (M. Kaufman). When, in February 1916, the trade unions and workers’ organizations influenced by the PPS-Left joined the Inter-Trade Union Commission, Bund representatives in the organization continued their cooperation with the representatives of the SDKPiL. In 1915–16, the Bund in Lodz, along with other socialist parties, conducted a large-scale propaganda campaign to set up democratic

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city self-government. Though the action, which included rallies attended by thousands of participants, and the issuing of appeals and petitions, ended in failure – Dovid Shvartsman, a leader of the campaign, was amongst those persecuted by the German authorities – the experience yielded fruit in the future, when the election for the Lodz City Council was announced. The Jewish Social Democratic Electoral Committee of the Bund competed for voters in the workers’ curia. The Committee won one mandate, while the Polish socialist groups, the SDKPiL and PPS-Left, won a mandate each. The Bundist seat in the City Council was taken by Likhtenshtayn, who cooperated with the representative of the PPS-Left, Ignacy Gralak, in the Council. Both the socialist activists proved to be staunch defenders of the Lodz proletariat’s interests. During the German occupation of Lodz, though the Bund managed to carry out its legal activities, it failed to legalize its Party journal. The radicalization of the political attitude of the city’s population during the First World War was caused by a drastic deterioration – due to war-related developments – in living conditions for those in Lodz, and especially in the life of the poorest group, and the repeated arrival of information about the revolutionary events in Russia. The Bund, along with other socialist parties, was a co-organizer of workers’ demonstrations in the streets of Lodz on May Day 1917. The Bundists participated in violent protests against the Brest Treaty and the policies of the German government. Fierce fights with the police took place. The police also made attempts to arrest the socialist City Council members for their radical initiatives.25 When the Polish independence organizations succeeded in disarming the Germans in Lodz (November 11, 1918), the Bund organized a rally and demonstration calling for social revolution. The PPS-Left and SDKPiL voiced revolutionary slogans and encouraged the proletariat to create its own governing bodies. Soon thereafter, the Bundists took part in organizing the election of delegates to workers’ councils, and subsequently they joined the City of Lodz Workers’ Council (December 29, 1918), which gathered the representatives of all proletarian groups. That institution, which was supposed to represent the interests of the workers, did not fulfill the hopes with which it was begun, and soon ceased to exist (August 1919).26 However, other institutions and areas of activity appeared. In independent Poland, the Bund, as a legal party, retained its position as an important factor in the social life, and as an element of the political scene, of the multinational industrial city of Lodz. In 1921,

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the Jews constituted 31 percent (139 000) out of 452 000 Lodz inhabitants, while the Poles amounted to 62 percent (280 000) and Germans to 7 percent (32 000). When, in 1939, the population of the city grew to 680 000, the share of the Jewish minority rose to 34 percent (230 000), that of the Poles dropped to 57 percent (388 000), while the German population increased to 9 percent (60 000). At the beginning of the 1930s, in the group of Jewish, professionally active, Lodz inhabitants (approximately 86 000), the vast majority were employed in industry and crafts (approximately 56 percent), in trade (27 percent), and in communication and transport (3.5 percent), while the rest were employed in other branches of the economy.27 The Bund retained its position as the most powerful group in the Jewish workers’ movement in Lodz. This position was achieved not only by the Bund’s well-established organizational structure, its high number of members and effective leadership but also by its influence upon the trade unions and other associations and institutions. In April 1919, according to a Party report, the Bund had 9500 members in Poland, of whom 1715 were in the region of Lodz; only the region of Warsaw could boast more Party members. Soon thereafter, however, the Lodz Bund organization suffered severe losses. Left-wing activists led a split in the Party structure and set up the Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund (Kombund) in 1922. Adherents of their views followed in their footsteps. According to some researchers, the Lodz Bund lost approximately 50 percent of its members. The secessionists took over the local Party journal (Lodzer veker), which led to yet another split, this time in the trade unions.28 The process of regaining influence for the Bund was hampered by fierce competition from the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), which was joined by the Kombund. The Poalei Zion, a traditional rival of the Bund, continued to struggle with it for influence over the Jews of Lodz. The Bund also fought political battles with numerous other Jewish and Zionist groups active within the Jewish sector of the city. At the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927, the Bund exerted influence upon numerous mass organizations, associations and institutions. Its activists supervised many a trade union, for instance those of the textile industry workers, wood-workers, building and leather industry workers, printers, stone workers, and brush makers, and also succeeded in setting up Bund departments in some other trade unions (for instance, those of the clothing and food industry workers and of the trade workers). The organization’s youth branch, the ‘Tsukunft,’ was closely connected with the Party. Comparable links were

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established between the Party and YAF. At the same time, and also later on, the Bund had a profound influence on the cooperative ‘Nasze Wyzwolenie,’ on a library named after B. Groser, primary schools and evening courses for adults, on teachers’ groups in lay schools, on other cultural and educational organizations and institutions (for instance, the Jewish Workers’ Cultural Association ‘Kultur lige’) and, finally, on a workers’ sports association. Bund members also resumed publication of the local Party organ, the Lodzer veker, which began to appear as a weekly in October 1926.29 The Bund was constantly interested in stimulating membership growth. Having determined that youth organizations were a natural source of recruitment, the Bundists paid a lot of attention to working out an effective mechanism for attracting new Party members. They spared no efforts in the ceremonies transferring a young man not only from the Tsukunft to the Bund but also from the Bund’s children’s organization, the SKIF, to the Tsukunft. In the 1930s the Lodz Bund organization was second in size among all local Bund organizations in Poland. In the middle of 1936 the number of members was estimated at 600 people. Likhtenshtayn (1883–1933) was the leader of the Lodz Bund organization. He was also one of the most influential activists of the Party in all of Poland and a member of the Central as well as the Lodz Committee. As a City Council member he played a prominent role in the government of Lodz. He was a talented speaker and the organizer of a cornucopia of actions and social institutions in the city. In the wake of Likhtenshtayn’s premature death, his funeral was transformed into a several-thousand-strong demonstration including not only socialists but others as well. Among the leaders of the Lodz Bund organization, apart from Likhtenshtayn, were Shmuel Milman, chief activist of the Bund trade unions; Khayim Leyb Poznanski; Efrayim Luzer Zelmanovitsh, an activist whose Party experience was accumulated over the entire period of the Bund’s existence; Menakhem Zilbershtayn; Yerakhmiel Pergament; Yoysef Morgentaler; Nisen Boymgarten; Benyomin Virovski; Dovid Poliak, and finally Sergey Nutkevitsh, who, in January 1937, was elected head of the Lodz Committee. Aleksander Margolis (1888–1939) also belonged to the group of leading activists. He was a physician as well as a social activist, and was closely connected with the Party when Lodz was in the Russian sector of partitioned Poland. For a number of years he held a City Council mandate in the government of Lodz. He popularized socialist ideas in the workers’ cultural and educational institutions and in the Party press.30

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Lodz activists of the Bund took a vigorous part in political life and appreciated the importance of such representative institutions as the parliament and the city’s government. In the period between the wars, there were 12 major electoral campaigns in Lodz – six parliamentary campaigns and an equal number of campaigns for seats on the City Council. The elections, which were sometimes only a few months apart, attracted scores of Lodz inhabitants, including the Jewish proletariat. After the announcement of Legislature (Sejm) elections in 1919, the Bund activists in Lodz conducted their own propaganda campaigns, set up an electoral committee and put forward a list of candidates. On election day (January 26, 1919), 7448 people voted for the Bund list. Though this total did not enable the Party to win a mandate, it gave the Bund the third place, after the Zionists and orthodox Jews, among Jewish organizations, ahead of the Poalei Zion. In the next two parliamentary elections, after successfully augmenting its electorate, the Bund in Lodz took part in the campaign independently of other organizations. In 1922 it won 12 492 votes, and in 1928 it received 12 598 votes, once again outpolling the Poalei Zion. In 1930 the Bund created the United Alliance of the Socialist Left, with the Independent Socialist Labor Party. However, the group, which received only 7155 votes, obtained a much worse result than had the Bund itself in the earlier elections. In 1935 and 1938, the Bund, like other opposition political groups in Poland, boycotted the parliamentary elections in protest against the non-democratic election law. Despite the fact that the Bund’s candidates in Lodz did not win a single parliamentary mandate, electoral campaign participation itself brought considerable benefits to the Party because it enabled the organization to publicize its program, and because the election results allowed it to verify its political influence.31 The first City Council election after Poland regained independence was held on February 23, 1919; 8925 votes were cast for the list of the Bund, which constituted 25 percent of the Jewish electors’ votes. Only the Zionists scored a better result (31 percent of votes of the Jewish electorate), while the Poalei Zion did much worse (14.3 percent). The Bund won five Council member mandates. Likhtenshtayn, Margolis, Poznanski, Boymgarten and Poliak became the Bund’s representatives in the City Council. In the next elections to the government of the city of Lodz the Bundists put forward independent candidate lists. They received the following results: in 1923 they obtained 8081 votes, approximately 21 percent of the Jewish electorate, which gave the

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Bund three mandates; while in 1927 they received 13 992 votes, which brought them five mandates in the City Council and three deputy members of the Council. The results clearly showed that the Party held a firm position amongst the Jewish voters and enjoyed the most influential status inside the Jewish group. Later on, the Bund decided to form alliances in the elections to the City Council. In 1934 it went along with the Polish and German socialists, but the Left lost the election, obtaining only seven seats, three of which were won by the candidates of the Bund. Bund activists put forward two joint lists with the Poalei Zion. In 1936 they received 23 685 votes (i.e. 48 percent of the Jewish electorate), which gave them six mandates, while in 1938 they managed to win eleven mandates. For obvious reasons, the number of mandates won by the Bund in the city government elections in Lodz did not entitle the representatives of the Party to take the key positions in the City Council (in total, the Council had 75 members) nor in the Magistracy. Neither did it enable the Bundists to conduct an independent policy in the Council. This situation forced the Bund’s Council members to enter into an alliance with the Polish socialists in the City Council, as they did in the election of 1927. At that time, the Bund representative, Margolis, became assessor at the Magistracy. After Margolis stepped down, his position was taken over by Milman. A similar alliance was formed after the victories by the socialists in the elections of 1936 and 1938, during both of which Milman was elected assessor. It is worth noting that City Council mandates were won by other prominent Bund activists in Lodz, like Likhtenshtayn, Poznanski and Morgentaler. The Bund councilors of this multinational city defended the interests not only of the Jewish group but also of the Poles and Germans. They proved to be ardent supporters of equality in all spheres of city life. Though the policies they advocated mostly applied to the Jews, who were disproportionally represented among the most discriminated group, the poor, they also give assistance to unemployed Poles. They stood firmly by other Jewish groups and, supported by the Polish and German socialists, vehemently opposed the anti-Semitic campaign which was waged by the nationalist Polish and German Right in the 1930s.32 The Bund activists in Lodz paid a great deal of attention to the problem of organizing gatherings, lectures and solemn commemorative meetings. The meetings they organized were held on Party and trade union premises or in hired rooms, and were conducted not only by the local activists but also by Party leaders from Warsaw. They were

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attended by Bund members and supporters, workers, intellectuals and the younger generation. At the meetings Party activity reports were read and current problems discussed. Participants in these meetings solemnly celebrated the anniversaries of the most important events in the Bund’s development and commemorated Party members who had died. They also discussed religious and literary issues, and commented on the then current political situation in Poland and abroad. The Fifth Conference of the Bund became an especially important event. It attracted the attention not only of the Lodz organization but of Bundists from other parts of Poland. Over a hundred delegates arrived in Lodz from different parts of the country. An important place in the activities of the Lodz Bund organization was occupied by the problems of the workers’ professional, cultural and educational life. The Bundists paid a lot of attention to attempts to improve the people’s living conditions. They took part in strikes in particular factories as well as general strike action by the textile workers (for instance, in 1935 and 1936), and undertook initiatives aimed at raising the income of workers of different professions as well as assisting the unemployed in the years of the Great Depression. Every year, the Bund accentuated its presence in political life by taking part in large celebrations of May Day and by arranging its own gatherings, meetings and concerts on that day. May Day was an important annual event in the city, and the Bundists’ typical mass attendance at May Day celebrations was noted as a sign of the Party’s influence, not only by the authorities and police but also by different social circles. The celebration of the workers’ festival in 1936 was particularly impressive. In that year, approximately 80 000 people demonstrated under the banner of a people’s united democratic alliance. Under this same banner the Bund, PPS and KPP also came to work out a form of cooperation. With the influx of information about the growing persecution of the Jews in Germany, the Lodz Bund activists organized mass protests. Beginning with September 1933, thanks to the Party leadership’s initiative, they organized a boycott of German products lasting for several months. They also arranged numerous meetings and rallies in Lodz and its region, at which they would issue resolutions against the Nazi terror in Germany. The question of the threat posed by Nazism was present in the life of the organization and in public demonstrations by its members later on as well. From autumn 1938 onwards, they watched the development of international events – the crisis in Czechoslovakia and the growth of tension in the relations between

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Poland and Germany – apprehensively. The uneasiness of Bundists was voiced early in 1939 in numerous lectures and at frequent meetings conducted by both local activists and country-wide leaders of the Party (such as V. Alter), who warned against the expansionist policy of the Third Reich, and who pointed out the necessity of mobilizing the Jewish working masses in Poland to fight off Nazism. The present sketch does not exhaust, of course, all the problems signaled in the title. Its main goal was merely to outline specific stages in the history of the Bund in Lodz, and to acquaint the reader with the most important events and personages in the complex history of the Lodz Bund organization. Consequently, it should be underlined that the full history of the Bund still awaits its historian.

Notes 1. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Di geshikhte fun bund in lodzsh (New York, 1958); see also A. W. Jasny [A. V. Yasni], Geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter-bavegung in lodzsh (Lodz, 1937). I was unable to make use of relevant Yiddishlanguage sources when writing this chapter. 2. H. J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, . CA, 1972), pp. 11, 82–3; Z ródl a do dziejów klasy robotniczej na ziemiach pols´ kich, ed. S. Kalabinski, ´ vol. III, part 1 (Warsaw, 1968), p. 322. 3. See J. K. Janczak, ‘Struktura spol´eczna ludnos´ci ´Lodzi w latach 1820–1918,’ . in Polacy-Niemcy-Z ydzi w ´Lodzi w XIX–XX w. Sasiedzi dalecy i bliscy, ed. P. . ‘ Samus´ (Lodz, 1997), pp. 40–98; A. Z arnowska, Klasa robotnicza Królestwa Polskiego 1870–1914 (Warsaw, 1974), passim. 4. On the ‘Lodz Rebellion’ and its consequences, see A. Próchnik, Bunt ´lódzki w roku 1892. Studium historyczne (Lodz, 1932); ‘Bunt´lódzki’ 1892 roku. Studia z dziejów wielkiego . konfliktu spol ´ecznego, ed. P. Samus´ (Lodz, 1993), passim. 5. H. Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja PPS 1893–1907 (Wroclaw, 1978), pp. . 107–8; S. Pestkowski, Wspomnienia rewolucjonisty (Lodz, 1961), p.. 30. 6. Z ródl ´a do dziejów klasy robotniczej, op. cit., vol. III, part 1, pp. 322–92; Zródl´a do dziejów rewolucji 1905–1907 w okregu ´lódzkim, vol. I, part 1, ed. I. ‘ . Ihnatowicz and P. Korzec (Warsaw, 1957), pp. 261–68; Historia z ydowskiego ruchu robotniczego na Litwie, w Polsce i Rosji (London, 1902), passim; M. Rafes, Ocherki po istorii Bunda (Moscow, 1923), pp. 53, 107–17; Tobias, The Jewish Bund . in Russia, op. cit., pp. 237–8. 7. Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja, op. cit., pp. 55–76; W. L. Karwacki, Lódzka organizacja Polskiej Partii Socjalistycznej-Lewicy 1906–1918 (Lodz, 1964), pp. 31–43; P. Samus´, Dzieje SDKPiL, w Lodzi 1893–1918 (Lodz, 1984), pp. 49–66. . 8. Z ródl a do dziejów rewolucji, op. cit., vol. I, part 1, pp. 488–528; ibid., vol. I, ´ part 2, ed. P. Korzec, passim; Carat i klasy posiadajace w walce z rewolucja ‘ ‘

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9. 10.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 1905–1907 w Królestwie Polskim, ed. S. Kalabin ´ ski (Warsaw, 1956), passim; . B. Mark, ‘Proletariat z ydowski w okresie walk styczniowo-lutowych 1905 . roku,’ Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 11–12 (1956), 32–42; B. . Mark, ‘Proletariat zydowski w okresie strajków ekonomicznych w lutymmarcu-kwietniu 1905 r.,’ ibid., 19–20 (1956), 21–4. . Z ródl a do dziejów rewolucji, op. cit., vol. I, part 2, pp. 271–6. ´ Rafes, Ocherki op. cit., p. 151; L. Mroczka and W. Bortnowski, Dwa powstania (Lodz, 1974), pp. 61–128; B. Mark, ‘Udzial´ proletariatu . z ydowskiego w czerwcowym powstaniu . ´l ódzkim i w walkach solidarnos´ciowych (1905),’ Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 23 (1957), 34–49; W. L. Karwacki, Lódz w latach rewolucji 1905–1907 (Lodz, 1975), pp. 57–70; P. Korzec, Walki rewolucyjne w ´Lodzi i okregu ´lódzkim w ‘ latach 1905–1907 (Warsaw, 1956), pp. 133–54. . Z ródl rewolucji, op. cit., vol. I, part 1, pp. 410–12, 505–35; ibid., ´a do dziejów vol. I, part . 2, passim; Karwacki, Lódzka organizacja, op. cit., pp. 44–63; Piasecki, Z ydowska, op. cit., pp. 144–55; Samus´, Dzieje SDKPiL op. cit., pp. 115–28, 151–4; see also notes 8–10. . Karwacki, ´Lódzka organizacja, op. cit., pp. 63–9; A. Z arnowska, ‘Klasa robotnicza Królestwa Polskiego w rewolucji 1905–1907,’ Z pola walki, special no. (1976), 72.. Piasecki, Z ydowska op. cit., pp. 228–31; Karwacki, Lódzka organizacja, op. . cit., p. 68; Rafes, Ocherki op. cit., pp. 158–61. Z ródl ´a do dziejów rewolucji, vol. II, ed. P. Korzec (Warsaw, 1964), passim; see also note 11. W. L. Karwacki, Zwiazki zawodowe i stowarzyszenia pracodawców w Lodzi (do ‘ roku 1914) (Lodz, 1971), passim; Hertz, Di geshikhte, op. cit., pp. 191–209. For details, see Karwacki, Lódzka organizacja, op. cit., pp. 64, 101; Samus´, Dzieje SDKPiL, op. cit., pp. 70–90, 151–4. . . Z ródl a do dziejów rewolucji, vol. II, pp. 267–8; Piasecki, Z ydowska, op. cit., ´ . pp. 170–1; Karwacki, Lódz, op. cit., pp. 149–54. Ibid, pp. 154–60. Ibid., pp. 96–106; E. Rosset, Oblicze polityczne ludnois´ci miasta ´Lodzi w ´swietle statystyki wyborczej (Lodz, 1927), pp. 14–28. . For more details, see A. Rzewski, ‘Lokaut ´l ódzki (1906–1907),’ Niepodlegl ´os´c´, V (1932). . Z ródl ´ (Warsaw, 1969), ´a do dziejów rewolucji, vol. III, part 4, ed. S. Kalabinski passim. Ibid.; A. Margolis, ‘Izrael Lichtenstein,’ Dziennik Zarzadu m.Lodzi, vol. 5 ‘ (1933), pp. 264–5. Karwacki, Zwiazki zawodowe, op. cit., pp. 318–20, 415–16; Rafes, Ocherki op. ‘ cit., pp. 211, 217–26. Rosset, Oblicze polityczne, op. cit., pp. 28–32; Samus´, Dzieje SDKPiL, op. cit., pp. 195–7. For more on the problem, see Karwacki, ´Lódzka organizacja, op. cit., pp. . 229–373; M. Hertz, Lódz w czasie wielkiej wojny (Lodz, 1933), passim. W. L. Karwacki, Walka o wl ´adze‘ w Lodzi 1918–1919 (Lodz, 1962), passim. See L. Mroczka, ‘Dynamika rozwoju i struktura spol´eczno-zawodowa gl .´ównych grup etnicznych w Lodzi w latach 1918–1939,’ in Polacy-NiemcyZ ydzi w Lodzi, op. cit., pp. 98–117.

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. 28. G. Iwa´nski, ‘Z ydowski Komunistyczny Zwiazek Robotniczy w Polsce ‘ 1921–1923,’ Z pola walki, 4 (1974). 29. Unless otherwise indicated, all data on the Bund organization in Lodz in the years 1926–39 are based on the following: Archiwum Pa´nstwowe w Lodzi, Urzad Wojewódzki w Lodzi, microfilm 12746–61, Sprawozdania ‘ miesieczne wojewody ´l ódzkiego i Wydzial´u Bezpieczenstwa ´ Publicznego z ‘ ruchu zawodowego, politycznego i narodowos´ciowego za lata 1926–39. 30. A. Pacholczykowa, ‘Margolis Aleksander,’ in Polski Sl ´ownik Biograficzny, vol. XIX (Wroclaw, 1974), pp. 636–7. 31. See details in B. Wachowska, ‘Zarys portretu politycznego elektoratu . zydowskiego w Lodzi miedzywojennej w s´wietle parlamentarnych i . ‘ samorza dowych kampanii wyborczych 1919–39,’ in Dzieje Z ydów w Lodzi ‘ 1820–1944. Wybrane problemy, ed. W. Pus´ and S. Liszewski (Lodz, 1991), . pp. 242–81; J. Walicki, ‘Z ydowskie ugrupowania polityczne w Lodzi w wyborach parlamentarnych 1928 roku,’ Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Historica, 54 (1995), 83–111. . 32. Wachowska, ‘Zarys portretu,’ op. cit., pp. 242–81; J. Walicki, ‘Z . ydzi i Niemcy w samorzadzie Lodzi lat 1917–1939’, in Polacy-Niemcy-Z ydzi w ‘ Lodzi, op. cit., pp. 359–76.

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9 The Bund’s Contribution to Yiddish Culture in Poland between the Two World Wars Nathan Cohen

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Bund, the Orthodox poet and writer Yisroel Shtern, whose outlook was generally quite distant from that of this Jewish workers’ party, wrote that, at a time when ‘gloom, vulgarity and ignorance prevailed, on the one hand’ among the Jewish masses in the Russian Empire, ‘alongside the suffocating assimilation and Russification of the intelligentsia on the other hand, members of the Bund, which was just starting out as a political movement, were the first zhargonistn, who took upon themselves the mission of educating the people in their own language.’1 Even in 1927, when this was written, the Bund’s interest in matters of education and Jewish literature had not diminished, and the party pursued this interest with care and attention. Shtern was not merely paying lip service to an institution that supported him as an author – as far back as 1895, future Bund pioneers in Vilna, Bialystok and Minsk established the zhargonishe komitetn, which offered reading and discussion groups to answer the growing need for popular and cheap literature by authors like Shomer [Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitsh] and Oyzer Bloshteyn.2 Three years later, the first bookstore in which only literary publications, and works that passed the Party’s quality (not necessarily ideological) review, was opened in Vilna.3 As the people who adopted the language of the masses as an integral part of their ideology, the leaders of the Bund did not stop at these functions; rather, they extended their reach to educate the young generation in this language – a principle that arose from the need for cultural autonomy, and acknowledgment of Yiddish as a language just like any other. One of the first authors to conceive of the modern Yiddish-language school was the journalist Yoysef Beker, who claimed that ‘A child will achieve a measure of normal development only when he is taught in his 112

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mother tongue.’4 Since the everyday language is the easiest and most natural vehicle for conveying class consciousness to the Jewish worker, and for awakening him to the struggle for his freedom and his rights, there was, at that time, an objection on the part of many Jewish socialists, not only to Hebrew, but also to all the languages used in the surrounding societies: Russian, Polish, and German. One of the first steps taken by those who advocated the use of Yiddish in modern educational institutions was the opening of eight adult education classes in Warsaw toward the end of 1906, under the auspices of the Polish organization for the dissemination of adult education – but after only a short time these courses were discontinued because the organization refused to recognize Yiddish as a legitimate language of instruction. Following intervention by Bund activists, courses in Yiddish were offered beginning in February 1907 within the framework of a Polish popular university: 27 of the 89 courses offered by the university were in Yiddish. By contrast, only 12 single-presentation lectures were offered to the general public in this language (out of over 100 lectures in total). An average of approximately 750 people attended each lecture.5 Toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, education began to be more and more widely discussed in the Party’s publications. The demand that instruction be carried out in Yiddish, in both private and community-operated Jewish educational institutions, was echoed and re-echoed. Over the Passover holiday in 1907, the first nation-wide conference of Jewish teachers in the modern/secular schools took place, with 44 Bund members participating, out of a total of 67 individuals attending the conference.6 The number of Bund representatives at the meetings of the St Petersburg Jewish Society for the Dissemination of Education, which led and guided the modern Jewish educational system, was also growing by leaps and bounds – although their actual influence was limited. Resolutions having to do with cultural autonomy and Jewish secular education in Yiddish, passed at the 8th conference of the Bund in Lemberg in 1910, were sent to representatives of the RSDRP in the Duma.7 During the same years, Ester Lifshits-Frumkin (‘Ester’) frequently expressed herself in matters of modern Jewish education. Her views, which concurred with the approach taken by the Party, appear in her book Tsu der frage vegn der yidisher folkshul (Vilna, 1910), where she wrote: A Jewish elementary school will be a national enterprise, but the proletariat will be able to make its imprint upon it from the outset.

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The proletariat must ensure that the idea not be distorted and contaminated in other people’s hands, that it not become a tool in the hands of the new nationalist reactionaries. The proletariat cannot build the elementary school-house alone, but it does have the power to influence this creation . . . not in order to serve the ancient dream of a past that has expired, but rather the brilliant idea of a dynamic future.8 Building upon this approach, the notion that ‘the issue of Jewish schooling is first and foremost a political question, a question of a platform or exposition of the party’s views, and it is therefore a Party issue,’ was crystalized thereafter9 – and it became a guiding principle for the Party during its entire existence. The First World War, and the turmoil it caused for Eastern European Jewry, helped Bund activists in their educational endeavors among children as well. The changes of government, and the enormous number of refugees, gave greater freedom of action to organizations and institutions that were willing to lend assistance, and thus, under the pretext of private volunteer activities, two early childhood teachers opened the first children’s home, named in memory of Bronislav Groser. The children’s home was intended to serve children of workers in Warsaw. Within three months, the number of children at this institution grew from 40 to 80. By the 1920–1 school year, there were four Groser educational institutions in Warsaw serving 500 children. The ‘educational branch’ of the Bund, which comprised a growing staff of teachers and tutors, operated during that period – cautiously – under the name Undzere kinder (Our Children). This organization received official recognition only in February 1921.10 In the provincial towns of Congress Poland as well, children’s homes and school classes were established modeled on the Warsaw institutions.11 The Undzere kinder organization generally worked in tandem with other socialist parties (Poalei Zion, for example) in all matters concerning the establishment of kindergartens, elementary schools and evening schools. The achievements of these institutions were truly impressive; during the 1919–20 school year, there were 28 Jewish–socialist educational institutions in Congress Poland, serving approximately 2000 children.12 By the following school year, 58 Jewish educational institutions existed; 46 of these were Socialist, with 23 belonging to Poalei Zion, 14 to the Bund, and 9 to the Fareynigte. Their great success, and the desire to expand the areas of their influence, led all the concerned parties to assemble in Warsaw for the

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first Schools Conference, which took place on June 15, 1921. There were 376 delegates representing four political lists: the Bund, 133; Poalei Zion-Left, 126; Kultur lige, 63; Fareynigte, 53.13 A number of resolutions were passed at the conference, concerning joint activities within the framework of a ‘Central Organization of Jewish Schools’ (acronymed TSYSHO Tsentrale yidishe shul organizatsie). The goal of this organization was the strengthening, development, and advancement of the concept of the socialist–secular Jewish school. A Bund member and activist, the highly esteemed Beynish Mikhalevitsh, was elected to be the first chairman of the organization. The Bund’s position was skillfully presented by Party leader Henryk Erlich at the conference and in the first issue of the journal for educational affairs, Shul un lebn, where he referred repeatedly to the principle that education is a political issue: The Jewish worker must remember, in toiling to establish and promote the development of a school for himself, that this is only part of the struggle. The broader contest faced by the entire proletariat is for a better social order, in which the souls of children would no longer be exploited as a means of augmenting the political and economic power of one social class.14 With this keen-edged focus, the Bund would hence forward attempt in all possible ways to prevent the TSYSHO framework from becoming more flexible, both in terms of allowing non-proletarian elements to join the organization, and in terms of curricula (for example, adding Hebrew language and Bible classes as compulsory subjects). Likewise, the Bund objected strenuously to a proposal submitted by representatives of the Kultur lige that would have required TSYSHO ‘to overcome the narrow, principle interests,’ and instead address cultural issues in the broader sense of the term – for example, literature and publishing – since, in their view, the whole purpose of the TSYSHO was to bring children educated in it ‘durkh shul tsu kultur’ (to culture through school).15 As we shall see a bit later on, the Bund viewed the Kultur lige as a competitor that could endanger its position in the cultural realm, and thus did everything in its power to limit the Kultur lige’s power and influence in this area. The departure of Y. Khmurner [Leshtshinski] and Kh. Sh. Kazdan from the Kultur lige, and their affiliation with the Bund, was particularly helpful in tying the hands of the Kultur lige, above all in the field of education.16 At the same time, the Bund was leading a stubborn and very often futile battle among politicians and Jewish and Polish cultural activists,

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in order to obtain recognition for schools in which the primary language of instruction was Yiddish. This struggle reached its peak during the two votes held in the Polish parliament, the Sejm (in February 1923 and December 1924), over a proposed resolution which would have required government support of these schools. The failure of both of these proposals is attributable to the Jewish parliamentary club’s vote in the Sejm.17 The Bund saw in this failure proof of the validity of their complaints concerning the Zionist and assimilationist conspiracy to pull the rug from underneath the heretofore stable position in which the Jewish masses then found themselves, and to cut these masses off from their healthy roots. Until July 1924, TSYSHO was considered an illegal organization, its various institutions – especially those belonging to Undzere kinder – suffering from harassment by the authorities, resulting in the closure of dozens of schools and children’s homes, and sometimes resulting in the shortening of the school year itself. Following governmental recognition of TSYSHO in July 1924, a temporary resurgence of the Yiddish schools’ activities occurred throughout the country, and on April 19, 1925 TSYSHO’s second national conference was convened. The Bund had the greatest number of representatives – 42 percent of participants at the conference. The resolutions that were drafted by the Bund delegates and accepted by the conference focused uncompromisingly on the working class (as the only basis upon which schools could exist), on secularism, and on Yiddish. The tenor and content of these resolutions led the Poalei Zion-Right party to declare that there was no place for it in the organization.18 The Pi´l sudski revolution, and the hopes it inspired within the Jewish and Polish socialist movement, also contributed to the recovery of the Jewish–socialist school network. In addition, TSYSHO received a one-time grant from the government in 1927. It reached its apex during the 1928–9 school year, at which point there were 46 kindergartens, 114 elementary schools, 52 evening schools, three gymnasia, and one seminar for the training of teachers affiliated with it – altogether, 216 educational institutions in a hundred communities, serving 24 000 pupils.19 TSYSHO’s educational network declined in inverse proportion to the Bund’s progress in the political and social arenas. The causes of this decline were mainly financial: the economic and political crisis in Poland, and the monetary restrictions that were frequently imposed upon the Jews. From the political point of view, the Bund’s freedom of movement was limited, and its supporters were perpetually suspected

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of being disguised Communists. These factors left TSYSHO in impossibly dire straits. The last complete statistics before the outbreak of World War II were for the 1934–5 school year: according to these figures, in spite of the adverse conditions prevailing, TSYSHO’s educational network comprised 11 kindergartens, 86 elementary schools, 70 night schools, and two gymnasia – 169 institutions altogether, with 15 486 pupils,20 amounting to 9.15 percent of all Jewish children studying in Jewish schools, and about 3.4 percent of all school-aged Jewish children in Poland.21 One interesting figure among these statistics is the geographical distribution of TSYSHO’s educational institutions: between 68.5 percent (during the 1926–7 school year) and 75.6 percent (for the 1934–5 school year) of TSYSHO’s schools were located in the eastern provinces of the country, mostly in Vilna and Bialystok. Only a small minority of these institutions were located in areas of Congress Poland, with a few isolated schools in eastern Galicia.22 TSYSHO published four different journals.23 Throughout their pages, issues and ideas which arose concerning the organization’s agenda, Polish Jewry in general, and educational questions, were discussed. The journals were read by teachers, pedagogues and parents, and greatly influenced secular Jewish education in Poland. It might seem, from a review of the dry statistics alone, that the Bund’s achievements in the field of education were quite modest. However, when we take all relevant factors – both those concerning the Jewish community itself, and external factors – into account, the Bund did have some accomplishments of more significant proportions, the most important of these being the creation of a Jewish secular educational system based entirely on the Yiddish language. We cannot ignore the importance of this system, which educated and shaped a generation, and which, despite the fact that most of this generation perished, along with much of Polish Jewry as a whole, made a profound imprint on the image of Polish Jewry in the twentieth century.

Journalism and publishing offered broader and more accessible fields of operation, and the Bund was able to claim more substantial accomplishments in these areas then it did in the educational sphere. As early as December 1896, Vladimir Kossovsky became editor of Der yidisher arbeyter, a Jewish workers’ journal published in Vilna. From the sixth issue of the journal (March 1899) onward, this publication was an organ of the Bund. Di arbeyter shtimme, the first underground

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Jewish workers’ journal, commenced publication – also in Vilna – in August 1897 (exactly one month before the launching of the Bund). The issue dated October 17 was put out by the Bund, which continued to produce the paper until the last issue, number 40 (September 1905). Circulation began at 800 copies, but grew in time to nearly 3000, with editions printed in Vilna, Bobruisk, Warsaw, and outside of Poland. These two publications were followed by a number of legal and illegal journals printed within the Russian Empire or abroad. During the period from 1899 to 1905, the Bund produced a long list of local workers’ publications, some of them single editions, some regular periodicals, in no fewer than 15 localities. From 1901 to 1903 alone, 32 journals and leaflets were published in Yiddish by the Bund. Its first attempt to publish a daily newspaper was carried out in Vilna on December 25, 1905, when Der veker came off the press – but this experiment lasted only three months. Until December 1907 there were two more attempts by the Bund to publish daily newspapers, both with little success.24 The three Russian-language publications of the Bund, Evreiskii rabochii (December 30, 1905), Nashe slovo (June 1906), and Nasha tribuna (December 1906), plus Nasze has´la (January–April 1906) in Polish, did not survive for more than a handful of editions. From this time until the end of the First World War, the Bund had to resign itself to a small number of single-issue publications, most of them clandestine. There were a few exceptions to this pattern, including two issues of Lebnsfragn, edited in Vienna and printed in Warsaw (May 8 and 18, 1912) – but the journal was confiscated, and all those concerned with its production in Warsaw were arrested and jailed.25 The principal journal of the Party at that time, the weekly Di tsayt and its successor, Unzer tsayt, were edited and printed in St Petersburg between December 20, 1912 and July 17, 1914.26 During the period of the German occupation, Vladimir Medem was granted a permit to recommence publication of Lebnsfragn, which appeared regularly from February 1916 to December 1918, after which it became a daily newspaper. In the first years of independent Poland the Bund enjoyed freedom of expression for only a very short time. On January 18, 1919, the police raided the Lebnsfragn offices. They confiscated copies of the newspaper, and arrested all those present. After two weeks, the paper renewed publication, and was able to appear almost uninterruptedly until March 23, 1920. At the same time, the authorities permitted a Polish-language weekly, G´los Bundu, between March and December

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1919. From that time onward, for a year and a half, the Polish police meticulously confiscated and banned all Bund periodicals. Convinced of the righteousness of what they were doing, the Bund activists continued to appeal to the masses through a series of single-issue publications, each with a different name. (No permit was required for single-issue publications.) In this way, at least 20 separate journal titles were published between March 24, and December 19, 1920, some of which were repeated a number of times.27 On December 24, 1920, the weekly journal Morgnshtern first appeared, with a legal permit; and immediately after it ceased publication, a new weekly, Folkstsaytung, appeared (on November 19, 1921). This latter periodical even received a permit for publication twice each week, and then daily, beginning on September 1, 1922. The Folkstsaytung was closed down for political reasons on two occasions, but it reopened after only brief closures, under a slightly altered name: Unzer folkstsaytung (May 1923 to June 1926) and Naye folkstsaytung (January 1926 to September 1939). Unlike all the other Jewish daily newspapers in Poland, the Folkstsaytung appealed to a specific, well-defined audience, and openly scorned the slogan Klal yisroel (the whole of the Jewish people), which all other Jewish political parties enthusiastically championed (except the Communists and, at least partly, Poalei Zion-Left). For the Folkstsaytung, the Jewish proletariat would lead the masses in the future; and to achieve this goal it was necessary to augment its class consciousness and detach it from all so-called bourgeois, orthodox and hypocritical displays of pan-class Jewish solidarity. In order to achieve the aim of serving as guiding light and faithful escort of the Jewish workers, the Folkstsaytung was always ready to fight for their rights, and sacrifice its commercial potential. It sold at a price lower than that of the other newspapers, and contained relatively few advertisements. As a result of the ongoing dialogue between the journal and its readership, the latter volunteered on occasion to participate in various ‘special campaigns’ with the aim of fund-raising and/or increasing the paper’s circulation. Every one of these campaigns was a tremendous success, and the positive results produced by each always gave strength and encouragement for the next one. A significant majority of the journalists working for the Folkstsaytung were not actually professional journalists, the one notable exception being Borekh Shefner. From 1928 onward, Shefner served as one of the three members of the editorial board of the newspaper. He regularly wrote editorials, and feuilletons on cultural affairs and politics, reported on debates in the Sejm, and also wrote on provincial life.

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Other staff members served on the board of directors of TSYSHO (Mikhalevitsh, until his death in 1928, succeeded by Khmurner). They took great pains to ensure that the newspaper would encourage and safeguard TSYSHO’s educational institutions. Of course, members of the journal’s staff took advantage of space on the news pages to expound the party’s platform, and for articles interpreting their political position in relation to every issue that arose on the public agenda. Thus, for example, readers were instructed whether to participate in or boycott general elections to the Sejm, and they were informed on how to vote in internal elections for Jewish community councils. The newspaper fought the authorities’ attempts to obstruct its publication, and likewise opposed the Zionist Tarbut schools network, which could have jeopardized their achievements. An intense quarrel transpired between the Zionists and the Bund during the summer of 1929, when the Bund supported the Arab position in the riots that were taking place at the time in Mandatory Palestine. The Zionist parties, through their main newspaper, Haynt, launched a severe attack against the Bund and Bund-supported schools, which allegedly taught self-hatred and a distorted view of reality. The editor of Haynt declared that, ‘if this is Jewish culture, then we are better off without it.’28 The Folkstsaytung immediately enlisted supporters and devotees of the Bund in a counterattack that lasted for weeks; apparently, from their point of view, they won this battle. One indication of the Folkstsaytung’s independent enterprise is that it declared a general strike on March 17, 1936, as a protest against the Przytyk pogrom, and that other Jewish periodicals, including the main publication of Agudes Yisroel, followed in its wake.29 Another example of the independence demonstrated by the paper was the courage exhibited by its editors in selling the paper on the Sabbath as well as weekdays. The first attempt to do this took place on December 21, 1923, creating a serious outcry, which resulted in the banning of the newspaper by the rabbis of Warsaw. Within a few months, publication on the Sabbath was discontinued. According to the journal’s management, this was done for financial reasons.30 On May 2, 1931, the paper renewed publication of a Sabbath issue, appearing regularly – including holidays – until Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), September 22, 1939. In contrast with most other newspapers at the time, the Folkstsaytung devoted much attention to issues of science, culture and sport. It placed great importance on the younger generation, and was the only Yiddish newspaper in Poland that published a weekly supplement for children and teenagers – Kleyne folkstsaytung. This practice was instituted in

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November 1926, immediately after Janusz Korczak began editing a children’s supplement in the bourgeois-Zionist journal Nasz Przeglad. The ‘ editor of the Kleyne folkstsaytung, Yankef Pat, seeking to create a medium for educating the next generation of Bund supporters, presented the Party’s ideas to young people in simple language with phonetic spelling. He provided young readers with lots of information about current affairs, primarily having to do with children and the Bund’s youth movements (SKIF and Tsukunft). Through this supplement, Pat inspired youths to engage in volunteer work, like distributing the newspaper among friends and relatives. He boosted young people’s feeling of belonging to the Party, and their identification with the Party’s adult activists. The children’s supplement also provided youths with an abundance of information on matters of science and technology, and a range of poems and stories by adult writers, along with some of the children’s own writing.31 Beginning in November 1923, the newspaper started occasionally devoting a column to literary news and criticism. From November 1924, onward, this column turned into a regular Friday supplement, under the editorial direction of Melekh Ravitch (who, incidentally, was never a member of the Party). The supplement contained news on Jewish literature (but not on literature produced in the Hebrew language) and also contained news on general literature, literary criticism, editorials, quizzes, surveys, poetry, short stories written by well-known writers, and inaugural works by young writers just beginning their careers.32 The Folkstsaytung was one of the standardbearers in the battle against noncanonical literature, called shund.33 The Folkstsaytung asked its readers to distance themselves from this kind of literature, and from the newspapers that published it serially. Instead, it provided readers with other novels, whose authors and content were selected with more discrimination. These works included novels by authors such as Yoysef Opatoshu and Borekh Glazman (New York), Dovid Hofshteyn, Melekh Ravitch, Shimen Horontshik, Moyshe Kulbak, Yehoshua Perle (who, until joining the Folkstsaytung in 1935, was considered a shund-style writer), Leo Tolstoy, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Anatole France, and many more. Because of the Bund’s close contact with the Kultur lige, many of these novels were printed also as books and sold at a discount to readers of the newspaper. In raffles and special campaigns involving prizes that were sponsored by the newspaper, books were the most common item to be given as prizes.34 Another novel idea carried out by the newspaper was the occasional presentation of ‘a lebedike folkstsaytung’ (a Live Folkstsaytung). Journalists, members of the newspaper staff, public figures, and editors

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would lecture on all sorts of issues in every field; members of the audience were then given opportunities to ask questions and to express their own opinions. In addition to the Folkstsaytung, the Polish Bund published dozens of other journals and newspapers on current affairs, the status of workers, professional unions, culture and art, education and children. Most of the Bund’s publications were in Yiddish, but there were also a few in Polish. The duration of these publications varied from one day to twenty years. For the most part, distribution was in Warsaw, but the Bund’s publications appeared in a sizeable number of other cities and towns throughout Poland as well. One exceptional publication was the Bund’s afternoon newspaper, Tsvey bay tog (April 24 – September 2, 1932). The fierce competition faced by the Folkstsaytung in the form of the large number of sensationalist, afternoon papers placed the editorial board under the necessity of publishing a popular newspaper that would provide an appropriate response to these other newspapers, without descending to their level. Tsvey bay tog drew on the same group of journalists as did the Folkstsaytung. It carried headlines on political and social issues, updates about demonstrations, strikes and the struggles of workers throughout the world, a popular science series entitled Unzer entsiklopedye (Our Encyclopedia), events behind the scenes in the Warsaw rabbinate, and on the closed psychiatric ward in the Jewish hospital, and three serial novels. Tsvey bay tog had an average circulation of 8600 copies (between a half and a third of the other sensational papers’ distribution). Because of its relatively serious character, the newspaper was a failure, and its publication was discontinued within a very short time.

Hand in hand with the dissemination of the Bund’s ideology and the publication of pertinent information to the working Jewish public in the format of newspapers and/or various single-issue publications, there arose a need to provide the same audience with real literary reading material as well – material which would coincide with the ideological platform of the Party. Since the zhargonishe komitetn (supra), were initially available only in Vilna, and had no means of satisfying this need, feuilletons and poetry had occasionally appeared in Di arbeyter shtimme, as a complement to the political articles and essays. In the Party’s other journals, and in the special anthologies devoted entirely to literature issued before the First World War,35 some of the major Jewish writers took part (among these were a number of

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bilingual writers), most of whom were neither members of, nor necessarily identified with, the Party – for example, Y. L. Peretz, Shimon Frug, Dovid Frishman, Avrom Reyzen, Sholem Asch, H. D. Nomberg, Zalman Shnior, Zusman Segalovitsh, Dovid Pinski, Der Nister, Perets Hirshbayn, and many, many more. These publications also included translations of works by famous authors such as Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyv, Michael Arcibashev, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. The great majority of the Bund’s publications in Russia were issued by Di velt publishing house, and by the Rom Widow and Sons Press. Between 1905 and 1915, over 130 Yiddish publications were issued, 109 of which came out between 1905 and 1908. Of these, over one-third were fine literature and literary anthologies. The Bund also owned a Russian publishing house, Tribuna, which produced 18 publications during the same period. During the First World War, the number of Bund publications fell to 20. With the better position in which the Bund found itself in independent Poland, and the opening of a network of TSYSHO schools, modern Yiddish literature occupied an increasingly significant position within the maze of Party operations. Since, in the Bund’s opinion, the survival of the Jewish nation should be based upon secular culture, it was essential to concentrate as great an effort and as many resources as feasible on bringing this to as broad a public as possible, and on encouraging and nurturing it. The easiest and most straightforward way to do this was by means of the literary supplement to the Bund’s daily newspaper; but the need was felt for something more than this. The first step taken in this direction consisted in the Bund’s taking control of the Kultur lige and its publishing house, from which the Bund removed Nakhman Mayzil and Zelig Melamed, who refused to accommodate their work to the ideology of the party36 (also because the former was identified from the outset as a communist sympathizer). Khayim Rafalovitsh [Meyer Vaser], a member of the Party’s Central Committee, was appointed director of the publishing operation; through his efforts, the publishing wing of the Kultur lige became one of the largest publishers in Poland.37 Vaser did not neglect the financial side of the business, making contact with the Yidisher visenshaftlekher institut (YIVO), and becoming the sole publishing house for the most popular among the contemporary Yiddish writers – Sholem Asch (in spite of frequent reservations on the part of the Bund regarding Asch’s publicly-expressed views in matters of politics and Jewish education). In 1928, the Kultur lige recommenced publishing the influential monthly bibliographical review, Bikher velt, which had been first

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published in Kiev in 1919, and thereafter in Warsaw, by Mayzil, during the period from 1922 to 1924. Bikher velt brought to the reader the most up-to-date research by the best-known scholars in the fields of Jewish culture throughout the centuries. The editors (M. Zilberfarb, Kazdan, and Khmurner) reserved space in this publication for original works, surveys, book reviews and lists of recommended reading. Obviously, these men toed the Party line in the performance of their editorial work, choosing material for inclusion according to the extent of its contribution to the formation of the reader’s politico-cultural consciousness. Due to a sharp decline in circulation, publication of the review was discontinued after about two years. Despite the grave economic crisis which befell Poland, and the heavy impact it had on the financial situation of the Jews, the Kultur lige and Di velt continued publishing books for reading and reference, including textbooks and journals at low prices which could be paid in installments, and which were occasionally given as outright gifts upon the purchase of one publication or another. The dwindling success of the literary supplement of the Folkstsaytung following Ravitch’s emigration from Poland, and the increased demand for a popular literary publication, prompted the Kultur lige to publish a new weekly periodical, the Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur (beginning with January 23, 1931), under the editorial helmsmanship of Kazdan and Pat. In the editorial comment which appeared in the first issue, they declared, Our Vokhnshrift does not intend to be merely a literary forum, merely a place to air new-old sermons. It is intended to be a forum for the popular culture of the creative secular Jewish public. This culture has become an influential factor in our lives; it has acquired organizational force. It is in the process of forging a new lifestyle and new values. . . . we do not wish to create a new political entity; we do not intend to be governed by a narrow ideology. We aspire toward the broadest form of tolerance of various cultural currents and literary trends. . . . we wish to serve the working public. Thus, the editors deserve to be praised in everything that has to do with encouraging young talent. They devoted an entire page of most issues to the prose and poetry of young writers,38 some of whom were well-known orthodox writers like Yankef Fridman and Yisroel Shtern, or Binem Heller, whose reputation as a communist was well known. Likewise, the editors provided patronage for the institutional organization of a group

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of young writers who had a socialist worldview, calling themselves SOSHAYF (an acronym for Sotsyalistisher shrayber farayn).39 Despite the good and just intentions of the SOSHAYF to participate in cooperative activities, the group was short-lived. In spite of the editors’ declared intentions, the Vokhnshrift was used for partisan political purposes, first and foremost in polemical confrontations with the competing weeklies that constituted its competition: Mayzil’s Literarish bleter, the communist-sponsored Literarishe tribune, and the apolitical Globus, edited by Arn Tsaytlin and Zelig Melamed. Publication of Vokhnshrift ceased in July 1935, and was replaced by a revival of the literary supplement in the Folkstsaytung. In December 1937, the Bund began issuing a new literary journal, Foroys. Here, too, the choice of material was eventually based on quality, as long as it did not openly contradict the party line. The Vokhnshrift’s aggressive political tenor was almost entirely absent from the pages of Foroys, largely owing to the fact that two of its main rivals had by then ceased to appear. In the grand, well-attended ceremony held in the Nowos´ ci Theater in Warsaw in celebration of the Bund’s fortieth anniversary, the Party’s Central Committee awarded prizes for achievements in literature, theater, education, and society. The prize for the best author was awarded to Itzik Manger, and the award for the best work of literature was granted to Yehoshua Perle for his book Yidn fun a gants yor. Prizes were awarded to Yung teater (see below), and a publishing house for children’s books called Kinder fraynd.40 The Bronislav Groser Library of Warsaw was the most prominent workers’ library, among many that existed even in the smallest of localities, that fell under the auspices of the Kultur lige. In 1933, approximately 20 000 books – over half of these in Yiddish – were housed in the Library’s collection. Habitual readers at the Library numbered about 1500.41 The Library’s manager was Herman Kruk, one of the most prominent activists in the field of Yiddish culture. Kruk looked upon the dissemination of Yiddish culture as a national mission of supreme importance. Under the sponsorship of the Kultur lige, an organization called Bibliotekn tsenter was also founded in 1924. The function of this organization was to communicate with each of the 662 Jewish public libraries in Poland, and to provide support for their development. Because of the difficulties encountered in organizing, and political friction, the activities of the Bibliotekn tsenter were paralyzed within a very short time of its establishment. By contrast, another initiative of the

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Kultur lige did enjoy a great deal of success: the organization of a series of classes and lectures for the general public, using the format of a popular university program. As evidence of this success, the Folkstsaytung declared that during the last two months of 1928, no fewer than 12 000 persons attended the 74 classes and 98 other cultural events held under the auspices of the Kultur lige.42

The Bund’s influence was felt not only because of the literary and cultural activities it offered, but also through its involvement in the Jewish cultural environment. This was evident particularly in the active part the Bund played in the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists of Warsaw. Since its establishment in 1916, one of the Association’s guiding principles was political neutrality. Here, representatives of every position in the Jewish political spectrum met, with more than modest success: orthodox and secular Jews, Hebraicists, Yiddishists and those who had chosen to adopt the Polish language. However, in 1933, an upheaval took place. The Bund’s representatives, together with those of Poalei Zion-Left and the Communists, made up a majority of the managing board, and maneuvered the election of the talented journalist Borekh Shefner to be chairman of the board (a position he held until the outbreak of the Second World War). As a result of the increased power of the Communists in the Association, which, because of its particular character, served as a forum and meeting place, and because of the fact that the number of their representatives now equalled that of the Bund on the managing board, the Association’s board meetings and gatherings of members increasingly became a forum for confrontation between the two camps, and had less and less to do with literature and professional problems. The Bund’s contribution to the cultural life of Polish Jewry did not overlook the theater either. During the period of the First World War, the Groser klub, a drama circle, was formed in Warsaw. This group carried on its activities throughout independent Poland in quite an organized fashion via the youth movement, Tsukunft. Over the years, Tsukunft’s drama classes expanded to include many towns and cities, with participants staging productions drawn from the best Jewish and non-Jewish plays.43 At the initiative of the Kultur lige, a two-year drama school was established under the direction of Mikhael Vaykhert; 22 pupils attended the school, almost all of them alumni of the TSYSHO schools. Studies took place during the evening hours, in the same building as one of the TSYSHO schools, and included a range

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of courses in the area of language, Jewish and general literature, art history and history of the theater, stage design, music, voice development, recitation and physical education. All courses were taught by professionals in the various fields. For about a half-year following the conclusion of their studies, graduates of the program, accompanied by the director, Dovid Herman, gave productions throughout eastern Poland. Upon their return to Warsaw, most of the actors joined the various Jewish theater groups there. The second incarnation of the drama school, with a three-year program, opened in 1929. When graduates of the school sought to continue working with one another, they founded – together with Vaykhert – the Yung teater, one of the best Yiddish troupes in eastern Europe. Despite financial difficulties (support from the Kultur lige was further and further reduced as the years progressed), and a constant fear of the censor, who, on more than one occasion, banned the group’s productions, and even revoked the group’s license, the Yung teater mounted 14 productions, 12 of which were performed over 100 times.44

When Hebrew writers and thinkers have tried to understand the reason for the steady decline of Hebrew culture in Poland, they have generally pointed an accusing finger at the Zionist establishment and its activists, who, they believed, have treated both Hebrew literature and the need to cultivate an active Hebrew-reading public with utter indifference.45 Such things could never be said of the Bund vis-á-vis Yiddish culture. Despite the fact that many of those who held leading positions in the Bund neither belonged to the proletariat nor spoke Yiddish in their homes, the Bund was the first and foremost institution to adopt the Yiddish language, and to set for itself the goal of doing all that was within its power to increase Yiddish usage, and make it the national language of the Jewish people, with all the consequences this would entail. Yiddish culture reached the apex of its most fruitful period, and had its greatest achievements, in independent Poland. There seems to be little doubt that, if it had not been for the Bund, and the devotion of this organization to Yiddish culture as part of its political ideology, the foregoing statement could not be made.

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Notes 1. Shtern, ‘Literatur mit a takhles . . . ober literatur,’ Literarishe bleter 45 (1927), 870. We should note here that the nickname zhargon for Yiddish expressed not only contempt but also a lack of recognition of this ‘base dialect’ as a proper language. 2. On this literature, called shund, and its role in Jewish society, see Ch. Shmeruk, ‘Letoldot sifrut ha’Shund’ beyidish,’ Tarbits, 52 (1983), 325–50. On the zhargonishe komitetn see A. Litvak, ‘Di “zhargonishe komitetn”,’ Royter pinkes, 1 (1921), 5–30. 3. Kh. Sh. Kazdan, Fun kheyder un “shkoles” biz tsysho (Mexico, 1954), pp. 268–70 (hereinafter ‘Kazdan’). 4. Beker’s words were published in issues 18, 21, 24, and 27 of the Vilna Folkstsaytung of 1906. The quotation cited here is taken from Kazdan, p. 271. 5. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Di ershte ruslender revolutsye,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. II, ed. G. Aronson, S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], E. Nowogrudski [Novogrudski], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1962), pp. 433–536. 6. Ibid., vol. III (New York, 1966), p. 46. 7. Ibid.; and Kazdan, pp. 281–3. 8. Ester, Tsu der frage vegn der yidisher folkshul (Vilna, 1910), pp. 96–7. 9. These words, followed by the signature M.R., were published in the Bund journal, Di tsayt, 24–5 (1913). The quotation cited is taken from Kazdan, p. 297. 10. See D. Meyer’s survey, Shul un lebn, 1 (1921), 43–7. 11. Sh. Lubelski, ‘Dos yidishe shulvesn in poyln,’ ibid., 1, 2, 3 (1921), 27–32, 30–2, 50–7, respectively. 12. Kazdan, p. 21. 13. Ibid., p. 94. 14. Shul un lebn, 1 (1921), 27. 15. Kh. Sh. Kazdan, ‘Tsu di oyfgabn fun der tsentraler shul organizatsye,’ ibid., 10. 16. On this issue, see Yoysef Leshtshinski, ‘Di tsentrale yidishe shul organizatsye un di kultur lige,’ Shul un lebn, 8 (1921), 1–3; see also Nakhman Mayzil’s memoirs, Geven amol a lebn (Buenos Aires, 1951), particularly pp. 20–1, 52–66 (hereinafter ‘Mayzil’); cf. also Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. IV (New York, 1972), pp. 333–8. 17. Shul un lebn, 1–2 (1922), 16–20; 11–12 (1922), 62–3; 3–4 (1923), 1–9, 18–22, 37; Kazdan, pp. 128–40. 18. Kazdan, pp. 153–5. 19. Ibid., p. 186. 20. Ibid., p. 188. See also N. Eck, ‘The Educational Institutions of Polish Jewry (1921–1939),’ Jewish Social Studies, 9 (1947), 3–32. 21. On these figures and the sources used to calculate them, see Ch. Shmeruk, ‘Hebrew–Yiddish–Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,’ in Ch. Shmeruk, Y. Gutman, and E. Mendelsohn (eds), The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover and London, 1989), pp. 291–2. 22. Kazdan, pp. 183–9. Incidentally, these statistics are similar to figures concerning the distribution of the Zionist Hebrew-language ‘Tarbut’ schools.

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23. TSYSHO’s publications were: Shul un lebn (1921–7), Warsaw, edited by Yitzkhok Lev (Poalei Zion); Di naye shul (1920–30), Vilna, edited by Yisroel Rubin (Faraynigte); Shul vegn (1934–9), Warsaw, edited by Yankef Pat (Bund); Shul fraynd (1936–9), Vilna, edited by Shloyme Bastomski (Fareynigte). Shul un lebn was also a publishing house, which was merged with the Kultur lige in 1925. Notable among the publications of this press is the series Shul bibliotek, comprising nearly 40 children’s books, both original works and translations. On publications in the field of Jewish education, see Kh. Urmian, Hamakhshava hakhinukhit shel yahadut polania (Tel Aviv, 1939). 24. For additional information about the Bund’s periodical publications up to 1917 see Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. I (New York, 1960), pp. 258–68; vol. II, pp. 437–39, 611–17; vol. IV (New York, 1972), pp. 140–60, 356–69. B. Nadel, ‘Itonut haMachteret shel haBund b’Rusia haTzarit,’ Kesher, 11 (1992), 40–63. 25. See V. Medem, Fun mayn lebn, vol. II (Warsaw, 1929), pp. 267–72. 26. It was under this title that a monthly journal was published from 1927 to 1932; this was the Party’s principal ideological platform. 27. For a detailed list of all of the Bund’s publications during the period under discussion, see Nadel’s article ‘Itonut haMachteret shel haBund,’ op.cit. 28. Haynt, September 18, 1929. The attack against TSYSHO in fact began before the riots, but gained momentum as a reaction to the Bund’s view, mentioned above. On this subject, see my doctoral dissertation, ‘Hamerkaz hasifruti veha’itona’i hayehudi b’varshah bashanim 1920–1942 be’aspaklaria shel igud hasofrim vehaitona’im,’ Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1995, pp. 198–9. 29. On the subject of the strike and its scope, see Immanuel Meltzer, Ma’avak medini b’malkodet: yehudei polin 1935–1939 (Tel Aviv, 1982), pp. 86–8. 30. Di geshikhte fun bund, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 144–5. 31. In addition, the Bund published a high-quality bi-weekly youth newspaper entitled Yugnt-veker, which appeared without interruption from December 1922 until September 1939. 32. This supplement was utterly and entirely dependent upon its editor. When Ravitch went away on an extended vacation in the summer of 1931, this was particularly evident. As his travels increased in frequency – resulting ultimately in his emigration from Poland – the supplement disappeared altogether. However, at the same time the weekly Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur began appearing on the newsstands. Toward the middle of 1936, when Ravitch again began playing an important role in its production (albeit from wherever he happened to be), the supplement reappeared. 33. On this issue, see my article, ‘Ha’itonut hasensatzionit bevarshah bein shtei milhamot ha’olam,’ Kesher, 11 (1992), 80–94. 34. In other (non-Bundist) journals, like Haynt, Moment, and Unzer ekspres, books were on the fringe of the body of prizes awarded, which included radios, cinema tickets, clothing, and hotel holidays. 35. These anthologies were: Far zunoyfgang (Vilna, 1898); In kamf (Vilna, 1900); Di fraye harpe (Vilna, 1906); Blumen un funken (Vilna, 1906); Friling (Vilna, 1907, 1908); Di velt (Vilna, 1907), 2 vols: the third version of the drama series Di goldene keyt, by Y. L. Peretz, appeared in the second volume;

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36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Lekoved peysakh, Zangen, Friling, Herbst bleter, Fayerlekh (Vilna, 1908); Zangen (Vilna, 1910). Shul un lebn, 10–11 (1922), 64; also Mayzil, Geven amol a lebn, op. cit., pp. 11–66. In 1928, for example, the Kultur lige published 67 books and journals. The Kultur lige’s greatest competition came from Boris Kletskin’s publishing house during this period, which published nearly 80 books and journals in 1929, but which thereafter fell into difficulties. January–February 1932, and thereafter sporadically throughout the life of the periodical. On this subject, see my dissertation (note 28), p. 195. Kh. Sh. Kazdan, ‘Di bundishe premias far literatur, teater, visnshaft un kultur,’ Foroys, 1 (1937), 2. B. Temkin, ‘Di yidishe bibliotekn in varshe in likht fun tsifern,’ Dos virtshaftlikhe lebn, 6–7 (1935), 21–2. Folkstsaytung, January 1, 1929. M. Perenson, ‘Dramatishe krayzn un teater-shtudies,’ in Yidishe teater in eyrope tsvishn beyde velt milkhomes – poyln (New York, 1968), pp. 327–31. M. Vaykhert, Zikhroynes – varshe (Tel Aviv, 1961), p. 345, cf. pp. 76–85, 227–50. See also, in Perenson, ‘Dramatishe krayzn,’ op. cit., pp. 128–30, 319–20. Solely for the purpose of illustration, see A. Steinman, ‘Lekheshbona shel tekufa,’ Hatekufa, 19 (5683/1923), 421–4; N. Bistreitski, Paneinu Lagola (Tel Aviv, 5692/1932); Kh. N. Byalik, ‘Hayahadut bagola,’ Ha’aretz, February 22–4, 1932; A. Droyanov, ‘Tziyonut bepolania,’ Moznayim, 10 (160) (5692/1932), 5–9.

Part III Other Socialists and the Bund

10 The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and the Bund Rick Kuhn1

. The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (Z PS) was established on May Day 1905. The choice of this date and the Party’s first public activities demonstrated that its inspiration was the Marxist concept of international workers’ solidarity in the cause of working-class selfemancipation, that is, socialism. The emergence of the Party was driven by the growth of the Jewish proletariat, and by its political and organizational needs. The Bund played a role in this process, but not as an initiator, driving force or determining factor. It offered, rather, a model for Jewish social-democratic policy, activity and militancy. This . argument is not original. Henryk Grossmann, a Z PS leader, made it in his 1907 account Der bundizm in galitsien, a pamphlet dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the Bund.2 But one of his polemical concerns was to rebut assertions from the Polish Social Democratic Party (PPSD) that . the Z PS was merely a pendant of the Bund (and/or Zionism). So Grossmann’s account did not include details of relations between the . Bund and the Z PS. . The following discussion outlines the history of the ZPS, free of the constraints imposed by argument with the nationalist section of the . Polish socialist movement.3 The focus is on the details of the Z PS’s relationships with the Bund, as well as similarities and differences between the two organizations. Their most important relationship, in shared politics rather than formal ties, is examined in the context of the development of the Galician Party, from its prehistory through to its fusion with the Polish Bund in 1920. In doing this, however, it is . important to bear in mind two important aspects of the Z PS. The first was the Party’s intimate if uncomfortable and unofficial relationship with the General Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) and the ‘central’ trade union movement associated with it. The second 133

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was the nature and political evolution of the Jewish working class in . Galicia. These and other elements of the Z PS’s history, notably the prehistory of the Party, before 1903, its activities in trade unions, amongst women and youth, during elections and in the cultural sphere, cannot be treated here for reasons of space, but I have examined them elsewhere.4 The discussion below starts with developments that immediately preceded the formation of the Party and its subsequent development. This is followed by a mere mention of its other activities, to the extent that these had a direct connection with the . Bund. The concluding section assesses the Z PS’s contribution to Jewish working-class life in Galicia.

Towards an independent Jewish organization In 1903, the already erratic publication of the PPSD’s Yiddish newspaper, edited by Hermann Diamand, was again suspended. Nor did the Party publish propaganda pamphlets that dealt with the concerns of Jewish workers, or engage Yiddish-speaking agitators. At the 8th PPSD Congress in January 1903, Diamand argued that Jewish workers should assimilate to superior Polish culture and read either Polish or Ukrainian social democratic newspapers. But there was a considerable demand for social democratic material in Yiddish. Given that the Party was unwilling to satisfy it, the gap was filled by Bund publications, which Galician activists obtained through contact with the Bund’s Foreign Committee. The PPSD’s leadership, however, eventually attempted to ban the use of this material.5 The PPSD’s attitude to Yiddish also placed in doubt the future of local, Party-supported Jewish workers’ educational associations and unions, often called Briderlikhkeyt (Brotherhood) and Forverts (Forwards). These groups organized weekly lectures in Yiddish, choirs, amateur dramatics, libraries and reading rooms. The PPSD’s most prominent leader, Ignacy Daszy´nski, however, affirmed their continuing usefulness and proposed a special conference of Jewish party members to assuage their rising concerns.6 The conference of Jewish PPSD activists took place on May 9–10, 1903, and was, from the perspective of the Party leadership, successful. Diamand read a letter from Victor Adler, the historic leader of the Austrian social democratic movement and friend of Daszy´nski. Adler expressed his opposition to the formation of a separate Jewish party.7 In other words, such a Party had no chance of admission to the SDAP or of financial support from its German component, which was comparatively well off and provided substantial subsidies to the PPSD.

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All but two of those present opposed setting up such an organization. One of these two was Henryk Grossmann. In recognition of the claims that the Party was not doing enough work amongst the Jewish proletariat, and the need for central coordination, the conference called for the establishment of a Jewish Agitation Committee. But it was placed under Diamand’s control and, in effect, only ever existed on paper.8 During the period after the 1903 conference of Jewish socialists, the political position of the leading Jewish activists in Cracow hardened. In early 1904 they had contact with Sinai Jakobi, a typesetter and experienced Bundist then resident in Cracow. He had been a member of the Bund committees in Warsaw and Lodz. While a group of militants in Lemberg had been in contact with the Bund since about 1898, it was through Jakobi that the Cracow activists gained access to Bund literature for the first time. And the ‘Bundist world view’ of a small circle of leading activists ‘took hold and crystallized in discussions with him.’9 Labor Zionism, with a base amongst white-collar workers, also appeared as an increasingly well organized rival to social democracy inside the Jewish working class. Austrian unions with a Zionist orientation held a conference in Cracow in May 1904. This was regarded as the founding congress of the Labor Zionist Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party Poalei Zion in Austria.10 Der yudisher arbeyter, Poalei Zion’s newspaper, started appearing in Yiddish instead of German in 1904 and was directed towards propagandizing Jewish workers in the PPSD.11 Concern to effectively combat the influence of Zionism in the workers’ movement was, therefore, an important issue for the Jewish social democratic militants, with their increasingly Bundist inclinations. To sustain the expansion of Jewish workers’ organizations and activities, the movement’s leaders believed that more agitators, literature and especially central coordination were essential.12 They were certainly right. But the need for clear, militant politics, coordination and centralization to promote working-class self-activity also applied to the Galician and indeed Austrian working class as a whole. The PPSD’s nationalist orientation was becoming more and more the pivot of its activities. This was particularly apparent in the increasingly close links between the Polish social democratic leadership in Galicia and the PPS, led by Józef Pi´l sudski, in Russian and German Poland. The PPS was the most nationalist of the socialist currents in the other parts of partitioned Poland. The relationship between the PPSD and PPS was formalized in the face of opposition from a number of political currents in the Party at the Galician organization’s 9th Congress held in October 1904 in Cracow.13 In 1897, the SDAP had already capitulated to nationalist pressures by

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adopting a federal structure.14 The early years of the twentieth century saw it adopt an increasingly parliamentarist orientation. The existing nationalist frameworks of the PPSD and SDAP both constrained the freedom of action of the Jewish militants in Galicia and influenced their own thinking. They opted to form an independent Jewish social democratic party in Galicia. The alternative of constructing a cross-national radical socialist opposition to the PPSD leadership was not systematically explored. But some efforts were made in this direction, notably the publication in Cracow of an oppositionist student journal, Zjednoczenie (Unity), in early 1905. Grossmann was its first editor.15 Another option, exemplified by Karol Sobelsohn, better known later as Karl Radek, was identification with the radical SDKPiL, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches.16 But this led Radek out of Galicia and to a focus on politics in Congress Poland. Dissatisfied with the continued indifference of the PPSD leadership toward Jewish workers, the Jewish militants caucused in Przemys´l on August 28–9, 1904, before the 9th Party Congress. They decided not to set up a new party straight away but established a secret initiative committee, based in Lemberg with Karol Eyneygler as secretary and Ruven Birnboym as chairperson. Tactics for the PPSD Congress were also worked out. The Party leadership soon got wind of the Przemys´l meeting. Daszy´nski asserted that it indicated the Bund was attempting ‘to set up a Galician branch.’17 The Polish Party leadership was, therefore, far from disposed to making concessions to the proponents of a Jewish social democratic party when the Congress opened on October 26, in Cracow. The main debates were over the national and Jewish questions. At the Congress, Grossmann moved a motion of no confidence in the Agitation Committee because of its ineffectiveness. Not only was the motion defeated but the Congress resolved that ‘a special class organization of the Jewish proletariat would damage the interests of the whole proletariat.’ Fourteen Jewish delegates and one other favored an autonomous Jewish organization. Subsequently the Party leadership dissolved the ineffective Agitation Committee because of fears that it might operate as a ‘party within a party.’ Henceforth, agitation amongst Jewish workers was to be conducted under the direct authority of the PPSD leadership.18 The main controversy at the Congress, however, was over the leadership’s proposal that the PPSD enter into a formal fraternal alliance (sojusz bratni) with the PPS. In effect this decision excluded cooperation with other socialist parties in Congress Poland, including the social democratic Bund and SDKPiL.19

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These developments were unfavorable, but predictable. The campaign for an autonomous Jewish social democracy continued, encouraged by Bronislav Groser’s presence in Cracow in late 1904. Groser, a Bundist student from Warsaw, was an excellent speaker and soon, during the 1905 revolution, a prominent Bund leader. While still in Cracow, he gave a public address on the Bund, under the auspices of the radical student organization Ruch, in which Henryk Grossmann was a leading figure. The event had a considerable impact on the Left. Participants in the subsequent discussion included Emil Häcker of the PPSD; Maksymilian Horwitz of the PPS, later a leader of the PPS-Left and a founder of the Polish Communist Workers’ Party; Feliks . Dzierz y´nski and Radek of the SDKPiL, and Grossmann. Subsequently, when Groser visited Galicia in 1907 and 1911, he worked closely with . the Z PS.20 In January 1905 a pamphlet in Polish, Proletariat wobec kwestii . z ydowskiej by Grossmann, was published in Cracow. It expressed the theoretical stance of the secret committee. Grossmann’s case for an independent Jewish organization drew on a number of arguments developed by the Bund and invoked its example.21 But he was critical of an early formulation by Vladimir Medem of the Bund’s neutralist position. Medem maintained that it was not at present possible to know whether eastern European Jews would be assimilated to other nations. Grossmann responded that ‘Jewish workers in big workshops, cut off from external influences, speak only Yiddish in their contact with the boss.’ At the same time, experience of larger workplaces has increased class consciousness. The least class-conscious workers, craftworkers, shop assistants, hairdressers, etc., were the most assimilated. Capitalism, he maintained, reinforced the distinctiveness of the Jewish proletariat.22 This was an original argument, which had merit, though only to the extent that Jewish and non-Jewish workers in larger enterprises remained segregated. The PPSD leadership took steps against the Jewish militants. Eventually they targeted the basic organizations of the Jewish working class. The Galician trade union conference of April 1905, under the influence of the PPSD, decided that the Jewish educational associations and general trade unions should be wound up within a year. PPSD leaders regarded these as ‘nests of sedition.’ With the Jewish proletariat’s capacity for political and social activity under threat, the members of the secret initiative committee felt compelled to act. Its seat was shifted to Cracow, where Henryk Grossmann took over as secretary.23 Preparations were made for the rapid formation of a new Jewish social-democratic party.

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These included notifying the Bund the decision to split from the PPSD and requesting its support, including literature.24 The Bund was never in a position to provide significant material assistance, apart from its publications. But its example, particularly during the 1905 revolution, and moral support helped ensure the Galician movement some real, though ultimately circumscribed, successes, which are examined in the following sections.

. The establishment of the Z PS Developments in Russia, where the Bund played a prominent role in the rising level of workers’ struggles in 1904 and then in the tidal wave of mass activity that was the 1905 Revolution, had decisive . influence in the formation of the ZPS in Galicia. This was clear in a resolution at the founding Congress. It expressed ‘admiration and recognition of the fighters of all nations in Russia, who struggle for the liberation of the proletariat from the Czarist yoke.’25 Systematic . public justification for the Z PS’s existence was, nevertheless, conducted in terms of the theory and history of Austrian social democracy. This was because the new Party sought admission as a federal component of the SDAP, alongside the other national parties. Such arguments also reflected the use the Bund itself had made of the development of federal organizational forms and ideas in Austrian social democracy. In 1897 the SDAP was reorganized as a federation of national parties. At the 1899 Brünn Congress the Party adopted a policy of national autonomy on the basis of (not necessarily contiguous) territories made up of members of particular nationalities.26 Karl Renner from 1899 and later Otto Bauer, leading theoreticians of Austrian social democracy, advocated national cultural autonomy through official national institutions, to which people affiliated on a personal rather than a territorial basis. The organization of religions in Austria provided an institutional model. These developments provided a theoretical rationale for the Bund’s position in its conflict with and, in October 1903, departure from the RSDRP. Grossmann, in particular, developed a case for the existence of a . Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation in eastern Europe.27 The ZPS made effective arguments based on precedent for its admission to the SDAP28 (which was never achieved). But there was another argument, persuasive in its pragmatism. First, the PPSD was nationalist and incapable of relating to Jewish workers. Secondly, the SDAP was organized on a

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federal basis. So, while a militant, internationalist organization of the entire proletariat was desirable, the only means available for the socialdemocratic organization of the Jewish proletariat was an independent Jewish organization, which could hope to gain affiliation to the SDAP. Anzelm Mozler, a pioneer of Galician socialism, summed up this position . very clearly at the ZPS’s founding Congress I personally believe that the best form of organization is indeed territorial. That is, instead of Polish, Ruthenian and Jewish parties on Galician territory we should have just one party, a Galician one. However, if the Germans, the Czechs, the Poles, the Ruthenians, the Italians and the Southern Slavs have their own organizations, there is no basis why the Jews should not have the same right. Where is it written down that there shall be only six national organizations and not, God forbid, seven?29 The establishment of an independent Jewish organization was not the new Party’s only immediate goal. It also promoted Jewish workers’ active solidarity and close cooperation with the Polish, the General Austrian, and indeed international, social democratic movement. This . was expressed at the Z PS’s first public appearance. On May Day 1905, the new Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia was proclaimed at rallies of Jewish workers.30 In Cracow militants distributed the Party’s founding manifesto in Yiddish (Vos vilen mir?) and Polish (Czego chcemy?),31 Proletariat wobec kwestii . zydowskiej, and a new Yiddish monthly, Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat.32 They also collected donations for Naprzód, the PPSD daily.33 Speakers explained why a Jewish social democratic party was necessary and that Jewish workers, under the banner of their own party, wanted to fight together, united with Polish and Ukrainian workers. As an expression of this desire, processions formed under red banners after the rallies. In closed ranks the Jewish workers marched to the central assembly points and then, together with the Polish and Ukrainian workers, marched in common demonstrations along the main streets. . The Z PS reported that After a choir sang the Marseillaise a huge, demonstrative procession of Jewish workers formed up to join the Polish comrades at the riding school and rally together with them. All Jewish unions joined the ranks. Fifteen red placards were carried above the tightly packed crowd, with Yiddish and Polish slogans (five with political

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and economic demands, nine with the names of trade unions: bakers, metal workers, boot makers and shoe makers, painters, cabinet makers, tailors, commercial workers, the general union of women workers, the young workers’ alliance and the general union Forwards). This impressive procession, in fours and eights, sparkled with red. Everyone was decorated with red carnations – the symbol of this year’s May Day. Satisfaction and happiness radiated from all faces: everyone was beaming. Three hundred young people with their banner were taking part for the first time in this festive procession beside old, gray-headed proletarians – perhaps their fathers – all concerned with one thought, with one and the same sentiment. Hearts beat with happiness in response to the events of the day: at the sight of hundreds of demonstrating Jewish workers; at the thought that the sublime idea of socialism had reached even these, the most disenfranchised of people; and at the thought that the Jewish proletariat had now straightened its hunched form, lifted its head bravely and come to self awareness. This wonderful procession, having passed through the Jewish district, grew like a wave, swelled. The closer it came to the riding school the larger it became. The number of demonstrators amounted to over 2000 Jewish workers.34 . In Lemberg 800 marched with the Z PS, while in Przemys´l 100 and Tarnów 180–200 Jewish workers participated in meetings held by the new Party.35 . The Z PS was also known as the ‘Galician Bund,’ while PPSD leaders and, following them, leaders of the SDAP referred to it as the ‘Separatists.’ In response to the activities of the proponents of an independent Jewish party, the PPSD leadership had revived the Party’s Yiddish weekly paper. After the split, loyalist Jewish members of the Polish Party regrouped and the 10th PPSD Congress in May 1906 established the Jewish Section of the PPSD. In 1907, the Section became the ‘Jewish Social Democracy of Galicia,’ but remained under the authority of the PPSD leadership. It never attracted much support.36 . The Z PS’s widespread following amongst Jewish workers was indicated by the attendance of 52 delegates from eight large urban centers in Galicia at its founding Congress in Lemberg on June 9-10, 1905. The Congress was opened on the anniversary of the execution of the Bundist hero Hirsh Lekert, by ‘a well trained male choir giving a beautiful rendition of “Di shvue”,’ the Bund’s anthem.37 Resolutions expressing the distinctive features of the organization were adopted.

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These included the desire for close cooperation with the PPSD, despite its hostility, and for membership in the SDAP; a commitment to combating Zionism in all its forms as the national chauvinist standpoint of the Jewish bourgeoisie; making the publication of a Yiddish weekly newspaper a priority; and the establishment of an association of young Jewish workers. It is also notable that a female delegate to the Congress drew attention to the need for more intensive organizational and agitational work amongst women workers.38 The Congress expressed support for the Bund’s struggles. The Bund Central Committee sent a careful greeting to the Congress: As you know, we have limited our organization’s activity to the interests of the Jewish proletariat in Russia. It is impossible for us to get involved in developments in Galician social democracy. But you also know that our sympathy is entirely with the goals you set out to pursue as pioneers. We have always believed and all our activity confirms the view that only a Jewish organization, an organization which has grown organically on the basis of the struggle of the Jewish working masses, which is indivisibly tied to them, develops in harmony with them, can be a true, real leader of these masses in their struggle for political and social liberation.39 Material assistance arrived from the Bund, in response to Grossmann’s request for a donation of literature. The June issue of Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat advertised that all of the Bund’s theoretical and agitational literature in Yiddish, Polish and Russian was available (at a 50 percent discount!) from the editorial office.40 The relationship was, . however, reciprocal: the Z PS aided the Bund by helping to smuggle material into and out of Russia.41 Agitation (focused on specific and immediate issues) and propaganda (dealing with questions in a more systematic way that linked issues together) in Yiddish was a crucial question in the foundation of the new Party. But this was an aspect of a deeper concern to relate to the specific . consciousness of Jewish workers in order to transform it. As the ZPS’s manifesto pointed out, it was not possible to use the same means to relate to Jewish workers as to Polish workers, ‘It is necessary not only to speak to a Jewish worker in another language, one must also understand his psychology; one must be able to speak to his soul, fire him up, revolutionize and seize him!’42 So the publication and distribution of literature in Yiddish was an important priority. Six thousand copies of Vos vilen mir? were published (and another 5000 in Polish), while 5000 copies

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of Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat were issued before it gave way to the weekly Der sotsial-demokrat in early October 1905. By its third issue the weekly was appearing in a print run of 2000. Between the Party’s foundation and October 1905, it had issued 10 000 leaflets in Polish and . Yiddish. Two and a half thousand copies of the ZPS’s 1905 pre-conference document were published in Yiddish and 1500 more in Polish. This was one of several substantial publications that used the model of the . Bund to justify the existence of the ZPS.43

Development of the Party . By October 1905, the Z PS had 2500 members, on a conservative estimate. They were principally organized in educational associations, local general trade unions, and branches of the central, i.e. Austrian social democratic, trade unions, led by Party members. These organizations were affiliated with the Party (only in 1911 was membership of . the Party reorganized on an individual basis).44 The Z PS became the dominant organization in the Jewish working class in Galicia.45 The Party progressively spread its influence out of the larger cities, into the towns and shtetlekh of Galicia. Organizing work, particularly in the shtetlekh, could be dangerous. In 1906, for example, workers came from other towns to work in a newly established shoe factory in Janów, a shtetl near Lemberg. Some of them were militants who set up a local socialist workers’ movement. But, particularly after the factory went bankrupt, they were persecuted in a series of attacks by religious zealots encouraged by the leadership of the shtetl’s kehile (organized Jewish community). On Simkhas Torah the zealots assaulted a group of workers. Then, on October 24, Volf Ek and Vint were beaten up. Ek died while Vint was hospitalized.46 Moyshe Papier, in a report to a Party Conference on August 3–4, 1907, . argued that the ZPS had experienced a first phase of development, when its forces were gathered together during a period of political upheavals which ended with the first elections to the Austrian parliament under universal suffrage, in 1907. A second phase had now begun, he argued. Now it was necessary to adopt a much more systematic approach to building the Party, including greater central coordination of strikes and boycotts to ensure they expanded the Party’s organizations.47 In a letter . to the Bund in October, Papier pointed out that the ZPS was growing and had taken the best advantage of the political climate of the Austrian elections. But the organization was in debt and short of funds. Could the Bund possibly provide a small monthly subsidy to help the Galician

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Party take full advantage of the considerable opportunities for extending its influence? The reply pointed out that Czarist repression had inflicted severe setbacks on the Bund, which was likewise desperately short of funds. The Bund also sought to learn about the social-democratic position on the kehile in Galicia, as this was an arena into which it was entering in the Russian Empire.48 . Between the second Z PS Congress of May 30–31, 1906 and the third on October 18, 1908, membership rose from 2800 to 3500.49 Ester Lifshits-Frumkin, who had come to prominence in Russia during 1906, conveyed the Bund’s greetings to the Third Congress.50 That Congress decided to move the seat of the Party Executive and Der sotsialdemokrat editorial office to Lemberg, to be closer to the majority of Jewish workers who lived in eastern Galicia. After its transfer to Lemberg, Der sotsial-demokrat increased in size and included a literary supplement. The format changed too: it was smaller but had more (eight instead of four) pages.51 Initially circulation rose but then . dropped back again. The supplement was abandoned. The Z PS leadership had not counted on the consequences of the economic crisis and higher unemployment from 1908 that affected the whole Austrian social-democratic movement. The recession also meant poverty, hunger, and a surge in the emigration of Jewish workers.52 Nor, in Lemberg, could the organization draw to the same extent on the talented militants in Cracow who had provided the Party’s central leadership since its foundation. Moreover, Henryk Grossmann, the Party’s most capable theoretician and strategist, left Galicia for Vienna . in late 1908. On paper the Z PS continued to grow. By the fourth Congress, on October 25–6, 1910, membership had risen to over 4200 and the Party was made up of 80 organizations in 32 localities. Many of the members, however, were inactive and only 2000 copies of Der sotsial-demokrat were being printed.53 From 1907, the Bund was decimated. Somewhat later and mainly for economic rather than political . reasons, the Z PS also had problems. This amounted to a period of stagnation in Galicia rather than near collapse as in Russia. . The Z PS’s tactical position changed when the Jewish Section of the PPSD, with only 377 members, fused with the autonomous Jewish socialist party in May 1911.54 This took place in the period leading up . to the Austrian elections of that year and helped consolidate Z PS support for PPSD candidates. It was testimony to the weakness of the . Jewish Section of the PPSD and the Z PS’s viability, even in the eyes of the hostile PPSD leadership. After the elections, however, the attitude of the PPSD became progressively more hostile. Later the Jewish social

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democrats of Bukovina, organized in the ‘Bukovina Bund’ (the Jewish . Social Democratic Association Bund), adhered to the ZPS. At the same time, the Bukovina organization remained part of the Social Democratic Party of Bukovina, which had become a federation of national organizations. In the meantime the fusion between the . Jewish Section and the ‘Galician Bund’ was confirmed at the Z PS’s Fifth Congress, on October 4–15, 1911, to which the Bund (in Lithuania, Poland and Russia) sent warm greetings.55 . At the sixth Party Congress of October 23–4, 1913, the ZPS in Galicia was renamed the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Bukovina. Eight hundred of the Party’s 4500 members lived in Bukovina.56 In addition to its presence in Galicia and Bukovina, the . Z PS had, at various times, organizations in Vienna,57 Antwerp, New York, and Bielsk in Silesia.58 A woman comrade, ‘Shtrahl’, represented the Bund’s Foreign . Committee at the sixth Z PS Congress. Henryk Shrayber also delivered a tribute to the contribution to Jewish workers in Galicia made by Bronislav Groser. The Bund leader had died in St Petersburg in December 1912.59 The Congress returned the location of the Party Executive to Cracow, a decision that weakened the influence of exPPSD Section leaders. In late 1913 a number of prominent members who had led the PPSD’s Jewish Section returned to the Polish Party . after its 13th Congress, in December, severed relations with the Z PS.60 This step did not, however, involve many rank-and-file members of . the Z PS. Nor did the PPSD resume its efforts to maintain a presence ‘on the Jewish street.’ The decline in the Jewish Party’s Galician membership between the 1911 and 1913 Congresses may have reflected dissatisfaction over concessions made to the PPSD in order to achieve the fusion.61 These included dropping the demand for national cultural autonomy (discussed below) from the Party program in favor . of an affirmation that the Z PS’s position on the national question was ‘open.’ But the impact of the economic downturn, associated with military conflict in the Balkans from 1912, on working-class morale is likely to have been more important. A key element of the Party’s activity was the publication of the . weekly Der sotsial-demokrat, which integrated and stimulated the ZPS’s political, trade union and cultural work. Its regular, weekly appearance, despite financial difficulties and censorship, was a strong indicator of the young Party’s growth and health. Maintaining such a publication was a huge task for a small organization overwhelmingly made up of impoverished workers.

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. The outbreak of war in August 1914 severely disrupted the Z PS. Its publications were shut down and its political and union activity suppressed. Many activists were conscripted and Galicia soon became a battlefield.62 Elements of the Party, however, were sustained or rebuilt during the War. The Cracow organization was revived as early as 1916, and a conference of delegates from different cities took place in Autumn 1917. Der sotsial-demokrat reappeared on October 15, 1918, and a Party Conference in Cracow, on October 18–19,63 gave new formal shape to the organization. Given the re-emergence of an independent Polish state, the conference decided to seek unity with the Bund. A further Conference took place in March 1919. During the . chaotic and revolutionary period after the War, the ZPS was very active, notably in campaigning against imperialist intervention against Soviet Russia. There were 4062 members (an underestimate because organization in eastern Galicia had been devastated by the vicious Polish administration of the region) at the time of the seventh Congress in Cracow on April 9, 1920. The Congress resolved to unite with the (Polish) Bund.64

Party activity . The Z PS devoted a great deal of effort to building the workers’ basic organizations, unions. The Party also sought to organize women and young workers and attached great significance and devoted considerable resources to political campaigns and cultural work. These activities are extremely important for a systematic understanding of the organization. I have examined them in my paper for the Bund Centenary Conference and elsewhere.65 This section notes only some . Z PS activities in which the Bund was directly involved. . It would be a mistake to see the ZPS’s cultural work as separate from its political activities. The two were integrated in the Party’s conception of the kind of struggles that were necessary to improve Jewish workers’ living conditions, for example in the demands for a Yiddishspeaking union secretary in Galicia, and Yiddish union newspapers. Without the development of a Yiddish workers’ culture it would be impossible to relate to and lead workers whose language was Yiddish. In pursuit of this goal, at its Second Congress in 1906, the Party adopted a resolution calling for national cultural autonomy for the different nations in Austria.66 ‘Lonu’ (Shmuel Gozshanski), one of the founders of the Bund, attended the Congress.67 The Galician decision on the national question in 1906 followed a reversal in the position

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. of the Z PS leadership. At the founding Party Congress, they had . argued that the Z PS’s program should simply be that of the SDAP.68 . The shift should be seen in the light of the Z PS’s failure to gain admission to the SDAP and the inclusion of the demand for Jewish national cultural autonomy in the Bund’s minimum program for the first time at its Sixth Congress, October 1905, in Zurich.69 As we have seen, the . demand was later dropped from the ZPS program in order to facilitate fusion with the PPSD’s Jewish Section. Yankef Bros’s address to the 1913 Congress indicated that national cultural autonomy had been removed from the program in order to bring it into line again with the SDAP program, and thereby facilitate recognition by the Austrian Party (which, it should be noted, had for all intents and purposes ceased to exist by this time). Nevertheless, Bros maintained, ‘we . remain convinced supporters of national cultural autonomy.’ Z PS Party Conferences in Autumn 1917 and October 1918 formally resurrected the demand.70 . Gozshanski’s attendance at the Z PS’s 1906 Congress put him in a position to convey to the Bund leadership the successes of the ‘Galician Bund,’ its efficiency and the closeness of its policies to those of the Bund. The Bund entrusted the organization of its seventh . Congress, held in Lemberg in August 1906, to the Z PS’s Executive . Committee in Cracow. Z PS representatives, including Henryk Grossmann, attended the event.71 The Bund’s Eighth Conference, in October 1910, also took place in Lemberg. Der sotsial-demokrat devoted considerable attention to the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference both before and after it took place in 1908. Members both of the Bund, including Ester Frumkin, . and of the Z PS attended the Conference. During her stay in Czernowitz, Frumkin helped set up the social-democratic Jewish Workers’ Educational Association ‘Morgnroyt’.72 A ‘special correspondent’ reported on the Conference for Der sotsial-demokrat.73 The newspaper also published a short piece by Y. L. Peretz, who identified Yiddish as the contemporary language of the Jewish people and the only possible language of a Jewish nation. Hebrew, he argued, was important as the language of their past. The accompanying editorial comment took a hard line in criticizing the Zionists for confusing the struggle for recognition of Yiddish by the Austrian regime.74 In 1909, the Bund intervened in Austrian social democratic politics . to support the Z PS’s (and its own) position on Yiddish. The Viennese social democratic daily Arbeiter-Zeitung had trivialized efforts to improve the status of Yiddish through a case before the Reichsgericht,

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Austria’s final appeal court. The Bund’s Foreign Committee objected in an open letter to the editors of the newspaper, protesting at the attack on the basic principles of international solidarity. Der sotsial-demokrat published this letter, whose conclusion, by using terms that could refer to both Russia and Austria, provided support for the existence and . activities of the Z PS.75 The debate between Jewish social democrats and Polish socialists in . the PPSD over assimilationism pre-dated the emergence of the ZPS and continued throughout its existence. A sharp polemic between the PPS and the Bund over this question, during late November and early . December 1911, illustrated the close relationship between the Z PS and the Bund. The argument between the PPS and the Bund was conducted . in the newspapers of their Galician allies, the PPSD and the Z PS. In the PPSD’s Lemberg organ G´los, Feliks Perl (‘Res’) of the nationalist PPS (Frakcja Rewolucyjna) argued that Jews were not a nation and did not have any national rights. From a patriotic Polish position he maintained that Jews should assimilate. The Bund’s Bronislav Groser (‘Adolf Shteyn’) replied in Der sotsial-demokrat.76

Conclusion . Politically, the Z PS and the Yiddish-speaking proletariat remained relatively isolated before the First World War. The Czech social democrats expressed some sympathy, but this was on an opportunistic rather than a principled socialist basis. The Czech Social Democratic Workers’ Party was involved in a conflict, colored by nationalism on both sides, with the dominant German component of the SDAP, with which Daszynski ´ and the PPSD had a longstanding alliance of con. venience.77 Z PS-influenced union branches continued to participate in the central Austrian union movement. The small size of the Yiddishspeaking working class meant that, in contrast to the vastly larger Czech union membership, a separate Jewish union movement would hardly have been viable (the same was true of unionized Polish . workers). The ZPS also conducted common campaigns with the PPSD and the SDAP. But the efforts of these latter parties to combat the oppression of the Jewish working class were modest indeed. . The Z PS’s isolation was largely a product of the increasingly nationalist and reformist climate in Austrian social democracy.78 There were no significant militant currents in the other social democratic parties who could have been serious allies for the independent Jewish socialist organization in Galicia. Henryk

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Grossmann located the weakness of the PPSD’s position on the Jewish question in the influence of bourgeois nationalism inside the Polish . Party.79 But Z PS militants never linked this critique of the PPSD to an assessment of the weaknesses of the positions of the SDAP’s leaders and theoreticians on the national question. In part this was because the Jewish militants shared Bauer’s and Renner’s (and the Bund’s) advocacy of national cultural autonomy. This shared perspective inhibited recognition that national cultural autonomy was a means by which the German–Austrian leadership reconciled social democracy to its own identification with the German-dominated Austrian imperial state and its unpreparedness to support the breakup of the Empire. The SDAP’s own federal structure represented a capitulation to nationalism within the workers’ movement.80 These circumstances and its efforts to unify Jewish social democratic . forces in Galicia affected the ZPS’s politics too. The Party made major concessions to Polish nationalism between the fusion with the PPSD’s Jewish Section and the withdrawal of the former Section leaders in late 1913.81 The decision to put the Party’s policy of national cultural auton. omy to one side attracted criticism. What is more, at the ZPS’s Congress in October 1913, a militant from Brody, Vander, supported the SDKPiL’s critique of the PPS, which also applied to the PPSD. Their strategy for the Polish working class was an alliance with Austria and its dynasty, rather than unity with the Russian working class.82 The Congress reaffirmed the Party’s support for equal rights for the Yiddish language and hardened up the Party’s position on the national question, but did not go as far as the resolution of the 1906 Congress.83 In the period between its formation in 1905 and the First World . War, the Z PS did, however, achieve a great deal as an expression of the political needs of Yiddish-speaking workers who had to struggle against exploitation and against oppression. Without its branches, and committees, as well as the unions and other associations linked to the Party, it is scarcely imaginable that Jewish workers could have . sustained such a level of activity over such a range of issues. The ZPSoriented unions conducted strikes and other economic fights. The Party itself led the Jewish proletariat in political mobilizations over matters of concern to the wider proletariat, as in the case of electoral reform, and campaigns over issues of specific concern to Yiddishspeaking workers, especially over the status of the Yiddish language. General unions and specifically educational associations conducted wide-ranging cultural work. The Party’s most significant achievement is expressed in two interrelated developments. First, it sustained the

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Jewish working class’s activity around its own interests and those of the working class as a whole. Secondly, a large proportion of the (admittedly small) politically active Yiddish-speaking proletariat identified with social democratic politics rather than with Zionism. Grossman provided a telling summary of the Jewish proletariat’s development in Galicia and the influence of the Bund, not as a direct organizational factor, but primarily as a model and inspiration: Before the rise of the ‘Bundist’ movement in Galicia, there really was a mass of Jewish wage slaves, searching blindly for the solution to the so-called Jewish question. In this regard, the PPSD, by pinning their hopes on the moment of socialism’s triumph, artificially divided the objective of equal rights for the Jewish masses from their other activities and socialist struggle. . . . The development of life in Galicia led to an improvement in this view and the Jewish masses began to search for other ways out. Into this situation the ‘Bund’ threw a ray of light with its practical and theoretical activity. It brought a consciousness and understanding into these elementary efforts and raised the Jewish working class to the status of a conscious political factor.84

Notes 1. This study arises from research for a biography of Henryk Grossmann. I am grateful for assistance with translations to Floris Kalman, Dominka Balwin, Eugene Bajkowski, Zbiszek Polak, and Shirad Galmor. Leo Greenbaum of the YIVO Archive provided invaluable assistance. Mary and Alex Gorman, Gerda and Kurt Kuhn have, as usual, encouraged this, as well as my other endeavors. 2. H. Grossmann, Der bundizm in galitsien (Cracow, 1907). . 3. In addition to Grossmann’s pamphlet, the pioneering work of two ZPS militants, Bros and Kisman, were key sources for the following sections, as were Piasecki and Najdus’s systematic studies in Polish: Y. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte fun der y. s. d. p. in galitsie,’ in Royter pinkes, vol. II (Warsaw, 1924); Y. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe sotsial-demokratishe bavegung in galitsie un bukovine,’ in Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. III, ed. G. Aronson, S. DubnowErlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], E. Nowogrudski [Novogrudski], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1966), . . pp. 337–480; H. Piasecki, Sekcja Z ydowska PPSD i Z ydowska Partia SocjalnoDemokratyczna, 1892–1919/20 (Wroclaw, 1982); W. Najdus, Polska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna Galicji i S´laska, 1890–1919 (Warsaw, 1983). ‘

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Unfortunately, I did not have access to a full set of the Party’s newspaper, Der sotsial-demokrat, as some important single issues and several full years are missing from the YIVO holdings on microfilm. R. Kuhn, ‘Organising Yiddish-speaking Workers in Pre-World War I Galicia: The Jewish Social Democratic Party,’ in Yiddish Language and Culture: Then and Now, ed. L. Greenspoon (Omaha, 1998), pp. 37–63. S. Gliksman, ‘Etapen biz zu der proklamirung fun der zpsd in galitsie,’ Der sotsial-demokrat, May 1, 1920, 3. See David Salamander’s criticisms of the distribution of non-PPSD material in Yiddish by Jewish workers’ associations in Naprzód, November 3, 1904, 1. Salamander was a Jewish supporter of the Party leadership. . Najdus, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 392–4; Z PS, Przed Kongresem (Cracow, 1905). . ‘Konferencya towarzyszy zydowskich in Lwowie,’ Przeds´wit, 23 (6) (June 1903), 255. . Najdus, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 394–5; Z PS, An die Sozialdemokraten in Oesterreich! (Cracow, October 1905); K. Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus: Die polnische und ukrainische Sozialdemokratie in Galizien von 1890 bis 1914. Ein Beitrag zur Nationalitätenfrage im Habsburgerreich (Hamburg, 1996), p. 132. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., pp. 40–1. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 368. For the ‘separatists’ receipt of Bund literature, see a letter from Henryk Grossmann to the Foreign Committee of the Bund, Cracow, April 8, 1905 (Bund Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York [henceforth: Bund Archives]: MG 2-107). A. Reiss, Bereshit tenuot ha Poalim ha Yehudim be Galitsyah (Tel Aviv, 1973), pp. 52–3. J. Bunzl, Klassenkampf in der Diaspora: Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Arbeiterbewegung (Vienna, 1975), p. 124. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., p. 44. For the national question and the PPSD, with a focus on relations with Ukrainian social democracy in Galicia, see Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus, op. cit. For the national question in the SDAP, see Hans Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna, 1963). Najdus, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 404, 435. Sobelsohn/Radek was a socialist with a Jewish background from Tarnow. For his activities, see J. Tuck, Engine of Mischief: An Analytical Biography of Karl Radek (New York, 1988); W. Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford, CA, 1970); and, a much more accurate work for this period, G. Strobel, Die Partei Rosa Luxemburgs, Lenin und die SPD: der polnische ‘europaische’ Internationalismus in der russischen Sozialdemokratie (Wiesbaden, 1974). For Daszy´nski’s statements at meetings of the Cracow Committee of the PPSD on September 26, and October 24, 1904, see Piasecki, Sekcja . Z ydowska, op. cit., pp. 88–90. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., pp. 44–5; Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., pp. 365–6.

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19. Najdus, Polska Partia, op. cit., p. 398; Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus, op. cit., pp. 134–6. 20. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., p. 41; F. Gutman, ‘An araynfir-vort in sheykhes mit der antshteyung un antviklung fun zshe.p.s.d. bizn yor 1911,’ typescript, pp. 16–17 (Bund Archives: MG 2-107); Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., pp. 368, 444. . 21. H. Grossmann, Proletariat wobec kwestii zydowskiej (Cracow, 1905), p. 31. A shortened version appeared as ‘Dem proletariat benegeye tsu der yidenfrage,’ in Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 1 (April 1905), 6–13, and ibid., 3 (June 1905), 7–11. 22. Ibid., pp. 28–30. 23. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., p. 45; L. Fayner, ‘Di bundishe prese in kroke fun 1905 bis 1930,’ in Historisher zamlbukh: materialn un dokumentn tsushtayer tsu der geshikhte fun algemayner yidishn arbeter-bund (Warsaw, 1948), pp. 18–23; Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., pp. 366–7. 24. Letter from Henryk Grossmann to the Foreign Committee of the Bund, Cracow, April 8, 1905 (Bund Archives: MG 2-107). Grossmann noted that Bronislav Groser supported his request for Bund literature. 25. Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 3 (June 1905), 22. 26. Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie, op. cit., pp. 314–15, 336. 27. See . Grossmann, Proletariat wobec, op.. cit. 28. Z PS, Przed Kongresem, op. cit., and Z PS, Bericht zum Gesamt-Parteitag der Oesterreichischen Sozialdemokratie in Wien 1905 (1 Mai–23 October 1905) (Cracow, 1905). 29. Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 3 (June 1905), 23–4. 30. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 369.. . 31. Z PS, Czego chcemy? (Cracow, 1905); Z PS, ‘Vos viln mir?,’ Der yudisher sotsialdemokrat, 2 (May 1905), 1–9. The manifesto was written by Grossmann, according to Fayner, ‘Di bundishe prese,’ op. cit., pp. 18–23. 32. The publication was justified in terms of the limited availability of socialdemocratic literature in Yiddish from the Bund and America. The first, ‘April,’ issue (only distributed in May alongside the second number) included an article on the Russian Revolution, which cited the Bund organ, Poslednie izvestiia. Feliks Gutman, ‘Vegn der grindung un tetikeyt fun “galitsianer bund”,’ Unzer tsayt (September 1955), 30–2, maintains that Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat was published by the Lemberg group and not under the authority of the Central Committee in Cracow. . 33. Z PS, Przed Kongresem, op. cit. 34. Ibid., emphasis in the original. 35. Ibid. . 36. Piasecki, Sekcja Z ydowska op. cit., pp. 137, 263; Najdus, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 460–1. 37. Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 3 (June 1905), 20. 38. Ibid., 21–7. 39. Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 3 (June 1905), 26. 40. Ibid., back cover. 41. Letter from Henryk Grossmann, Cracow, July 27, 1905 (Bund Archives: MG 2-107). . 42. Z PS, Czego Chcemy? (Cracow, 1905), p. 2.

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. . 43. Z PS, Bericht, op. cit., p. 2; Z PS, Czego Chcemy?, op. .cit., p. 4; H. Grossmann, ‘Odpowiedz Polskiej Partyi soc. dem. Galicyi,’ in Z PS, Przed Kongresem, op. cit., p. 10; D. Balakan, Die Sozialdemokratie und das jüdische Proletariat (Czernowitz, 1905); Grossmann, Der bundizm in galitsien, op. cit. . 44. Z PS, Bericht, op. cit.; Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 438. As was the case with the PPSD, therefore, the unions also collected party dues from their members. 45. I. M. Horn, Mehkarim (Jerusalem, 1951), p. 155. Horn’s testimony to this effect is significant, as he sympathized with Poalei Zion. 46. Der sotsial-demokrat, November 2, 1906. 47. Der sotsial-demokrat, August 9, 1907, August 16, 1907. 48. Letter from M. Papier to the Foreign Committee of the Bund, Cracow, October 9, 1907, and reply of 7/20 [sic] December 1907 (Bund Archives: MG 2-107). 49. Der sotsial-demokrat, June 8, 1906, October 9, 1908. 50. Der sotsial-demokrat, October 23, 1908, 1. According to Feliks Gutman, Frumkin was in Galicia on several occasions and .A. Litvak (Khayim Yankef Helfand), a founder of the Bund, also visited the ZPS, ‘An araynfir-vort,’ op. cit., p. 14. 51. The new format appeared in Der sotsial-demokrat, November 13, 1908. 52. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 460. 53. Der sotsial-demokrat, October 21, 1910. . 54. Piasecki, Sekcja Z ydowska, op. cit., p. 263. 55. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 437. 56. Ibid., pp. 433–4, 446, 456, 460. According to Gutman, 95 percent of the . merged organization came from the ZPS and only 5 percent from the PPSD’s Jewish Section, Gutman, ‘An araynfir-vort,’ . op. cit.; Kisman’s account suggests that the relationship between the Z PS and Jewish social democrats in Bukovina was one of harmonious and progressively . closer links. For their complaints of the ‘stepmother’ attitude of the Z PS and Grossmann’s concern to avoid conflict with the general Bukovina Party, see Der sotsial-demokrat, October 30, 1908, 2. 57. Der sotsial-demokrat, October 21, 1910. Grossmann took up residence in Vienna in 1908. In February 1910 he delivered a talk at the Vienna . Ferdinand Lassalle Club, associated with the ZPS [leaflet advertising talks at the ‘Jüd. Arb.-Bildungs Verein “Ferdinand Lassalle”’ (Bund Archives: MG 2130)]. I am grateful to Jack Jacobs for pointing this out to me. 58. Gutman, ‘An araynfir-vort,’ op. cit.; letter from M. Papier to the Foreign . Committee of the Bund, Cracow, October 9, 1907, for organized Z PS supporters in New York and contact with comrade Lesin, presumably the poet, socialist and editor of Forverts in New York, Avrom Lesin; Der sotsialdemokrat, October 11, 1907, and November 15, 1907, for correspondence from New York. 59. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 460. 60. Ibid., pp. 464–5. . 61. For the existence of an opposition in the Z PS see Der sotsial-demokrat, January 12, 1912, 6; Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 458; Piasecki, Sekcja . Z ydowska, op. cit., pp. 298–9. According to Reiss, however, expressing a . Poalei Zion perspective, many Z PS members were disillusioned by the

The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

153

. fusion between the Jewish Section of the PPSD and the Z PS, see Reiss, Bereshit tenuot ha Poalim ha Yehudim be Galitsyah, op. cit., pp. 159–66. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., pp. 473–4. Ibid., pp. 475, 479. Der sotsial-demokrat, May 1, 1920, however, indicates that the 1918 Conference took place in November. Der sotsial-demokrat, May 1, 1920. R. Kuhn, ‘The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and the Bund,’ paper presented to the Bund Centenary Conference, Warsaw, November 26–7, 1997; Kuhn, ‘Organising Yiddish-speaking Workers in Pre-World War I Galicia: The Jewish Social Democratic Party,’ op. cit. Bros, ‘Tsu der geshikhte,’ op. cit., p. 46. Der sotsial-demokrat, June 8, 1905, 1, 4. Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, June 3, 1905, 22. N. Levin, While the Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York, 1977), p. 319. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., pp. 463, 475, 479. Der sotsial-demokrat, May 1, 1920, however, indicates that the 1918 Conference took place in November. L. Hass, ‘Grossman, Henryk,’ in Muzeum Historii Polskiego, Ruchu Rewolucyjnego. Sl ´ownik Biograficzny Dzial´aczy Polskiego Ruchu Robotniczego, II, E–J (Warsaw, 1992), pp. 384–6. Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 454. ‘A.K.’, ‘Di ershte yidishe shprakh konferentz in tshernovits,’ Der sotsialdemokrat, September 4, 1908, September 11, 1908. Y. L. Peretz, ‘Vegn der yidisher shprakh,’ Der sotsial-demokrat, October 2, 1908; and see Der sotsial-demokrat, August 28, 1908. Also, see ‘L.F.’ (presumably Leon Fayner), ‘Nakh der konferenz fun der yidisher sprakh,’ Der sotsial-demokrat, September 25, 1908. ‘Ein budapester Orpheum-Spaß vor dem Reichsgericht,’ Arbeiter-Zeitung, October 29, 1909, 4; Foreign Committee letter, Der sotsial-demokrat, November 19, 1910, 5; Kisman, ‘Di yidishe,’ op. cit., p. 427. Ibid., p. 444. Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus, op. cit., pp. 49, 74–5. Ibid., pp. 137, 146, 189–90. Grossmann, Der bundizm in galitsien, op. cit., pp. 28, 37. For the formulation of just such a critique see L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1977), pp. 910–13. Trotsky here contrasts the Austro-Marxists’ attitude to the question of national oppression with Lenin’s. It should be noted that the Bund also favored a federal form of organization for the RSDRP and did not support the self-determination, to the point of independence, of Poland or other oppressed parts of the Russian Empire as a demand which could be used to undermine the stability of the Czarist state. For detailed discussions of the national question in Austrian social democracy, see Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie, op. cit.; H. Mommsen, ‘Die nationale Spaltung der Sozialdemokratie in Cisleithanien,’ in Die Bewegung: Hundert Jahre Sozialdemokratie in Österreich, ed. E. Fröschl, M. Mesner, and H. Zoitl (Vienna, 1990), pp. 186–92; R. Löw, Der Zerfall der ‘Kleinen Internationale’: Nationalitätenkonflikte in der Arbeiterbewegung des alten Österreich (1889–1914) (Vienna, 1984); Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus, op. cit.

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81. E.g. Der sotsial-demokrat, December 6, 1912, December 7 and 13, 1912, 1–2, in accord with the nationalist position taken by the PPSD (and for that matter, with the line of Austrian foreign policy), attacked Czarism and supported Austria in its commentary on the rising international tensions associated with the first Balkan War. The newspaper also published a twopart article by M. Hankiewicz (a PPSD leader) on ‘The Socialist Proletariat and War,’ Der sotsial-demokrat, November 1, 1912, 4, and November 8, 1912, 4. Also, see S. Unger, ‘Tenuat HaPoalim HaYehudim BeGalitsiyah Erev Milhemot HaOlam HaRishonah – Kishlon Megamot HaLikud,’ Gal-Ed, X (1987), 140–1.. 82. Piasecki, Sekcja Z ydowska, op. cit., p. 295. 83. Ibid., p. 297. 84. Grossmann, Der bundizm in galitsien, op. cit., p. 48.

11 From Conflict to Cooperation: the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party, 1897–1939 Piotr Wróbel

Throughout the history of Poland, elements of Polish and Jewish cultures merged in many fields. There were groups of Jews and Poles, originally mutually antagonistic, who changed their attitudes and greatly improved their relations. A history of the relationship between the Bund and the PPS is a fine illustration of this phenomenon. Initially, before the 1920s, Bund–PPS relations were antagonistic or even hostile. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the relationship between the two parties fluctuated between initial forms of cooperation and the old conflicts. Finally, the late 1930s showed that in spite of many setbacks and the heavy burden of the past, cooperation was possible between Polish and Jewish socialists. In the 1870s, the Jewish workers of the Russian Empire, persecuted and exploited, began to join revolutionary groups and to organize themselves. In 1874, the first Jewish socialist circle was established in Vilna. In the 1880s, the Jewish workers formed the first illegal semi-trade unions and socialist groups studying Marxism. By 1890, a large Jewish socialist Vilna-grupe was created, held its first May Day rallies, began to publish underground pamphlets, and had discussed long-term programs. By the mid-1890s, the Jewish social democratic groups had transformed into a real movement. In 1897, representatives of several Jewish social democratic groups met in Vilna and established Der algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund in rusland un poyln – the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Russia and Poland.1 The Bund created an organization to maintain strikes and a propaganda apparatus. The Party had its own system of communication with the revolutionary centers in Western Europe. In addition to workers, the ranks of the Bund swelled with an influx of Jewish students from middle-class families, who were attracted by the romantic revolutionary atmosphere in the Party and who were disappointed by their 155

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situation in Russia. The Party bridged the abyss between Jewish workers and Jewish intelligentsia and was active in the Russian army.2 Initially, the Bund was dominated by assimilated Russian Jews, and devoted little time to the Jewish national problem. Some of its leaders denied the existence of the Jewish nation. Jewish issues were considered a matter of tactics rather than of principle. Yiddish was used in the party propaganda for practical reasons. However, a mass influx of Jewish youth changed the profile of the party. After the pogroms of Kishinev and Homel, the Bund began to organize self-defense groups to safeguard the Jewish population. The national question became increasingly important to all party debates. In 1898, the Bund entered the RSDRP as an autonomous organization. The Fourth Congress of the Bund, held in 1901, placed the national problem at the top of its agenda. It adopted a full-fledged national program, declaring that the Jews should be recognized as a nation and receive ‘national cultural autonomy,’ that Russia should be reorganized as a democratic multinational republic, and that the Bund should have a clear status as a separate national–democratic party within the federal structure of the RSDRP. A nationalist wing of the Bund claimed that it should develop a Jewish national consciousness. Many people came to the Bund from the general Russian social democratic movement. At times, particularly in Ukraine, a newly established group of the Bund recruited most members from an already existing local group of the RSDRP. In 1903, at the Brussels congress of the RSDRP, the Bund demanded that it be regarded as the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat in the Russian Empire. The Bundists asked that the RSDRP be rebuilt as a federative party, stated that Yiddish should be one of the official languages in the future democratic Russian federation, and insisted again that Jews should enjoy ‘national cultural autonomy.’ Lenin and the Russian delegates, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, opposed this sharply and called the Bundists ‘opportunistic, nationalistic, and separatist.’ The Bundist motion was defeated. The Bund decided to leave the congress and the RSDRP, the leadership of which became hostile towards the Jewish party.3 The PPS, established in 1892, also opposed the Bundist aspiration to represent all the Jewish workers of Russia. The PPS united social and national goals and aimed at the rebuilding of Poland as a democratic republic. The PPS tried to be active in all parts of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and to convince all its ethnic groups to contribute to its future revival. Some Jewish social democratic groups joined the PPS or cooperated with it. The establishment

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and the activities of the Bund became a serious obstacle in this context. The PPS believed that its territorial program conflicted with the Bundist principle of ‘national cultural autonomy.’ The Bund initially developed mostly in the Polish-dominated parts of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in the Congress Kingdom of Poland (occupied by Russia). The PPS believed that Poland would regain these regions, and tried to control the socialist movement there, to stop the establishment of other socialist parties, and to act as the sole representative of the working class in the lands of partitioned Poland. The leaders of the PPS, both those of Polish and those of Jewish origin, claimed that all the workers of the Polish territories must act together, and sharply rejected national programs of ethnic minorities. In 1891, the Second Congress of the Socialist International in Brussels issued a resolution that called for a union between Jewish workers and proletarians in all countries. The Polish Socialists translated the original French expression union avec into the more emphatic zlanie sie (fusion) and claimed that the Jews should join the future ‘ Polish socialist party both as individuals and as an organization.4 From its inception, the PPS accused the Jewish social democrats of activities leading to the Russification of the lands of the former Commonwealth. The fall of the 1863 January Uprising was followed by a massive anti-Polish repression. The danger of Russification was especially clear in historical Lithuania, where the Poles were losing ground. Pil´sudski, the leader of the Polish–Lithuanian branch of the PPS, tried to draw the Jewish social democrats from their cooperation with the Russian social democrats and to win the Jews for his party. He was not successful, in most cases, and criticized the Jewish social democrats for the Russification of Lithuania and for ‘economism’ – concentrating on economic demands and neglecting politics (in other words, not fighting for the independence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth).5 During this period, the PPS was also losing its competition against the Bund in Warsaw and central Poland. More and more Bund activists arrived there from Vilna and Russia proper and developed Bundist groups. Relations between the Bund and the PPS turned sour. The Bundist propaganda accused the Polish socialists of not being real revolutionaries fighting for socialism, but instead being Polish nationalists aiming at the reconstruction of a Polish multinational state and ‘leading the workers into a trap of bourgeois politics.’ As proof, the Jewish social democrats pointed to the fact that the PPS did not agree to allow the Jews to have their own socialist organization. The Bund

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emphasized that it was the only representative of the Jewish proletariat and rejected the right of Polish parties to represent the Jews.6 The PPS claimed that there were bourgeois tendencies in the Bund, that the Bund opposed the independence of Poland, and that it cloaked this stance under revolutionary phraseology. The Jewish social democrats, stated the PPS leaders, consciously created an antiPolish attitude within the RSDRP and painted the PPS as a chauvinistic organization in the international socialist arena. The separatist activities of the Bund, the PPS continued, isolated the Jewish proletariat from the Polish workers and contributed to the development of anti-Semitism. The Fourth Congress of the PPS, held in 1897, following the tone of the 1891 resolution of the Socialist International, emphasized that the Jews living in Poland and Lithuania should fight together with the workers of these countries against the Czarist regime and that a separate Jewish organization would break the socialist principle of international solidarity. The PPS believed that a future restoration of Poland would solve the Jewish problem automatically because the Jews would be equal citizens within a Polish democratic republic. The PPS leaders claimed that cultural national autonomy was important only in authoritarian countries. In a fully democratic country, such as the United States, the PPS asserted, even the Bund did not suggest any cultural autonomy. The PPS also condemned the Bund for its cooperation with the radical SDKPiL.7 The PPS–Bundist war eased during the 1905 Russian revolution. The Bundists fought with exceptional devotion, played the key role in most events of the revolution, and suffered the largest casualties during the clashes with the Russian army and police. The Bund, the SDKPiL, and the PPS managed to cooperate and their members frequently participated together in demonstrations, strikes, self-defense activities, and attacks on Czarist police and administration. Sometimes, however, there was no cooperation at all among the three parties.8 During the revolution of 1905, the Bund reached its zenith. In 1906, the party had about 33 000 members in the entire Empire, including about 16 000 in Poland and historical Lithuania. After the revolution, the Party went through a deep crisis and lost most members. Only in 1911 did the Bund begin to intensify its activities again.9 The decline of the Bund was paralleled by a crisis in the PPS. In 1906, during its Ninth Congress, the 55 000-strong party split into two organizations – the PPS-Revolutionary Fraction (which, after

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1909, reverted to the name PPS), and the PPS-Left. Both of them paid less attention to the Jewish issue than had the entity from which they emerged.10 The Bundist–PPS conflict calmed although there was no cooperation. In 1910, the Ninth Conference of the Bund stated that an independent Poland would not be an improvement for the Jews. ‘The Polish bourgeoisie . . . if it gets power, plans to oppress the other minorities,’ claimed the Bund leadership, and it concluded that it desired neither a free Poland nor a Jewish state in Palestine but a federal Russia.11 The outbreak of the First World War proved the emptiness of the slogan of proletarian international solidarity and paralyzed the socialist parties. In Warsaw, the Bund distributed anti-war leaflets and tried to organize an anti-war socialist action committee, but the PPS did not want to cooperate with it. Only the PPS-Left and the SDKPiL offered their help. Soon after the beginning of the war, it became obvious that the Bundist groups in central Poland would be isolated from the Bund in Russia proper by the Russian–German front. In November 1914, the Central Committee of the Bund in St Petersburg appointed the Warsaw Committee of Bund Organizations in Poland. This decision became de facto the beginning of the Bund in Poland as a separate organization. In August 1915, the Germans took Warsaw and communication between the Polish and the Russian Bund became very complicated. When the Russian administration and oppression disappeared, the life of Jews was elevated to German standards and improved greatly. Jewish educational, cultural, political, social, and economic institutions mushroomed. The Jewish population’s attitude towards the Germans was, at least initially, very friendly.12 The Poles watched these developments with apprehension. The Bund was going through a period of organizational explosion, but the Party leaders were still divided on the issue of Polish independence. On November 5, 1916, the German and Austrian Emperors announced the establishment of a Polish Kingdom. The Central Powers badly needed Polish army volunteers. The announcement was a clear political maneuver and most Poles remained very skeptical. However, they did not like the Bund’s statement opposing the creation of Poland without the approval of the working class. In June 1917, after the March Revolution, during a plenum of the St Petersburg Soviet, one of the most important Bundist leaders, H. Erlich, proposed a resolution calling for Polish independence. Most Bundist participants at this meeting agreed to support it only on the condition that assurances would first be given that in a future Poland the rights of all national

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minorities would be protected and the Jews would have cultural autonomy. A division of the Bund into two organizations, one Russian and one Polish, was not welcomed by the Bundists and their attitude towards Poland’s independence was lukewarm. The PPS did not want to accept any conditions and claimed that the Jews were passive and indifferent to the independence of Poland. The PPS still did not want to cooperate with the Bund or any other party of the ‘revolutionary Left’ which did not support the independence of Poland. When, in 1916, the Bund appealed to all socialists to form an electoral bloc for the first election to the Warsaw City Council, the PPS refused to do so. It displayed the same attitude towards the Bund in 1918.13 The Russian Revolution divided the Bund in many ways. It was the only Jewish party within the Soviets ideologically placed between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. After the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, the Bund condemned it as a coup d’état and a conspiracy against a true workers’ revolution. According to Erlich, the Bolshevik government was not a true workers’ government and the Bolshevik system was not socialism. Other leaders and numerous Bundists supported the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik Revolution started the process of the disappearance of the Bund in Russia. One fraction of the party joined the Bolsheviks. Another part, opposed to Bolshevism, was annihilated, and, by the end of 1921, the Bund in Russia ceased to exist.14 Until the end of 1917, the Polish Bund Committee maintained the fiction that the Polish Bund was just a part of the Russian Bund. After November 1917, it was impossible to continue this fiction. In December 1917, the Polish Bund Committee called a conference in Lublin and formally organized itself into a separate party. In 1918, it supported the independence of Poland but demanded cultural autonomy for the Jews. It was suspicious of the PPS and refused the invitation proffered by Pil´sudski (as head of the Polish state) that it consult with him, noting that it would not do so unless all the minorities in Poland were granted national autonomy. The PPS was against cultural autonomy for the Jews, claiming that they did not constitute a separate nation and that autonomy would weaken the Polish state. The PPS believed that democracy would constitute a solid guarantee of Jewish social–cultural development. When anti-Jewish violence started in the territories controlled by Poland, the Bund accused the PPS of not taking a strong stand on anti-Semitism. The Bund asked the Socialist International for help, and the International’s 1919 Conference in Bern condemned the pogroms.15

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From the very beginning of its existence in independent Poland, the Bund was divided into three factions: center, right-, and left-wing. A struggle among them for control over the Party paralyzed the Bund for the next four years. The left wing, which controlled the Party from 1919, opposed parliamentary democracy and supported the Bolshevik scenario: Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a consequence, the Bund did not participate in the first election of the Polish Parliament in 1919, fought against the PPS in the Councils of Workers’ Delegates, and opposed the war with Soviet Russia, which caused Polish police retaliations against the Party and a further alienation from the PPS. In some regions of the reborn Polish state, such as the Vilna or Bialystok region, the Bund considered itself more Russian than Polish and included strong pro-Bolshevik fractions. The 1920 Conference of the Bund decided to join the Comintern. This, however, proved to be impossible. The KPP denounced the Bund as a nationalistic party. The Comintern set conditions for those parties that wanted to join: a purge of ‘reformists,’ ideological cleanup, and organizational centralization. The Bund leadership did not accept these conditions. Local Bund groups, on the other hand, did, and affiliated themselves with the KPP. The Comintern sent its agents to Poland to split the Bund. In 1921, the Kombund fraktsie was created, and in 1922, the Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund of Poland was formed. It accepted the conditions of the Comintern, entered it, and, several months later, was incorporated into the KPP.16 After the split of 1922, the Bund, now ruled by the center, began to participate in the political life of the Second Polish Republic. The new party leadership considered the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia a catastrophe for world socialism. Some leaders believed that the Bund should help build democratic institutions in Poland and adopted a typical socialist platform supplemented with the demand for cultural autonomy for all national minorities. In 1922, the Bund participated for the first time in the Sejm (Parliamentary) elections in Poland and organized an extremely active campaign. However, the Bund was attacked from two sides. The Polish authorities continued their operation against the Party, arrested its members and closed its institutions. On the other side, the KPP, which included many Jews in its ranks, violently attacked the Bund. Bundists received a total of 87 000 votes from many electoral districts, but this total did not entitle the Bund to a single deputy in the Parliament.17 After the 1922 election, some Polish and Jewish socialists felt that the socialist movements in Poland would have done better if they had

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united. Already during the electoral campaign, the PPS occasionally helped the Bund. In May 1923, the Bund proposed a conference of all socialist parties in Poland to fight nationalism and anti-Semitism. The PPS answered with an offer to create a common secretariat of the socialist parties in Poland. The Bund rejected this plan and established an agreement only with the German Social Democratic Party in Poland. The PPS could not decide if it considered the Jews a national minority or a religious group. In 1924, both parties signed an agreement on common action against fascism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, but this agreement survived only for a period of several months. The Bund was more ‘Marxist’ than the PPS and more concerned with its independence. The Bundists opposed the PPS’s cooperation with ‘bourgeois parties’ and claimed that the Polish Socialists had no program for national minorities. The PPS answered that the Bund supported the development of Jewish nationalism.18 In May 1926, the PPS and, to a lesser extent, the Bund supported Pil´sudski’s coup d’état. The coup succeeded, partly due to a strike organized by both parties. After the coup, the parties stayed in touch and waited for a change. But soon their illusions vanished: Pil´sudski proved to be not a champion of democracy but a dictator with no real program. From a Jewish point of view, there was a positive consequence of the coup: anti-Semitism waned. The Bund, however, expected more, in the form of financial help and political support for Jewish social institutions. Eventually, the Bund turned against Pil´sudski and accused him of ruling ‘in the interests of the big landowners and capitalists.’19 During the next Parliamentary election in 1928, some leaders of the PPS and of the Bund tried to organize a common campaign against the National Democrats, the Catholic bloc, and the Pilsudskiite Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (Bezpartyjny Blok Wspól´pracy z Rzadem – BBWR). The Bundist leaders understood that ‘ their electoral chances were minimal and attempted to persuade local organizations to vote for the PPS lists. This plan was not popular among rank-and-file Bund members. In several cities with large Jewish populations, such as Lodz, an attempt to create a common international socialist front failed. Yet, in the town of Bialystok, the PPS and the Bund for the first time formed one electoral bloc. Again, not a single Bundist was elected to the Sejm. Some Bund leaders came to the conclusion that a closer cooperation with the PPS was necessary, others offered the idea of a federation of the PPS, the Bund, the Ukrainian Social Democrats, and the German Social Democratic Party in Poland. Representatives of the Bund participated in conferences of

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the PPS. In January 1928, V. Alter stated in an interview that the Bund had a different program and different tactics than the PPS, but that the Jewish socialists wanted to cooperate with their Polish colleagues.20 Yet, a leftist wing of the Bund leadership, led by Khmurner [Leshtshinski] and Khayim Rafalovitsh [Meyer Vaser], was against any cooperation with the PPS. The leftists argued that the PPS was not a revolutionary but a reformist and opportunist party still including Polish nationalists and supporters of Pil´sudski. The leftist Bundists accused the PPS of disguised anti-Semitism and opposed the official Bundist ‘friendly criticism’ of the PPS as too mild. At the same time, the leftists wanted to continue their fight for a Bolshevik-type revolution.21 The PPS leadership was divided as well. Some leaders did not want to cooperate with the Bund because they were afraid that their party would lose a large part of its constituency which was unfriendly towards the Jews. There was disagreement on trade union federation. In 1928, the PPS went through a split. The establishment of the Pilsudskiite PPS-former-Revolutionary Fraction (PPSdFR) weakened the main party. Some of its leaders claimed that in this new situation a cooperation with the socialist parties of national minorities, including the Bund and Poalei Zion, was necessary. Other leaders declared that the Bundist policy was too vague and ambiguous, especially in its attitude towards the PPS.22 The PPS and the Bund participated separately in the dramatic 1930 Parliamentary election, but the Bund once again won no seats. Its membership declined steadily: there were 7500 Bundists in Poland in 1929 and 7000 six years later. The Bund was isolated from mainstream Polish political life, from other socialist parties, and, at the same time, as an anti-clerical, anti-Zionist movement which rejected Hebrew, was detached from the Jewish community.23 The PPS also went through a crisis after the elections of 1930. The Party lost a considerable part of its membership and its influence in the trade unions.24 Concurrently, between 1928 and 1933 there was a Bund faction willing to work with the PPS in selected fields and ready to shape the Bund into a social democratic party with a West European style. These supporters of a limited cooperation with the PPS, led by Erlich and Alter, won during the 1930 Bund Conference (at which the decision was made to join the LSI). Erlich and Alter, and the leaders of the PPS, Mieczysl´aw Niedzial´kowski and Hermann Diamand, represented the Polish socialist movement in the Executive of the LSI. This and internal problems in the PPS made cooperation between both parties easier.25 In addition, the PPS was looking for allies because, in 1929,

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it began to organize the Centrolew, a broad coalition of the political center and Left. It wanted to attract all socialist parties active in Poland. In October 1929, the PPS and the Bund organized a joint demonstration demanding improvement of the living standards of the working class. Several days later, the PPS, the Bund, the German Social Democratic Party in Poland, and the Central Committee of the Trade Unions held a common meeting and came to an agreement that regular contacts and some forms of cooperation were necessary. During the elections to city councils in Cracow and Tarnów in 1930 and 1931, the Bund and the PPS ran a joint slate. In 1931, the PPS, the Bund, and the Poalei Zion organized their first joint May Day parade in Warsaw.26 However, in 1932 and early 1933, the leaderships of the Bund and the PPS discontinued their cooperation. The Polish socialists criticized the Bund sharply during the 23rd Congress of the PPS in October 1933. They accused their Jewish colleagues of patronizing the PPS and of acting like an arbiter between the communist and socialist movements. The PPS did not want to adopt the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Simultaneously, the Bund was involved in negotiations with the KPP. The KPP attacked the Bund as a party of ‘social fascists’ but, at the same time, tried to make changes to and influence its policies. A group of leftist Bund activists supported cooperation with the KPP, and in 1934, an introductory agreement was signed between both parties. However, it did not work. The KPP did not want to recognize the Bund as a partner and as a Marxist class party representing the Jewish proletariat. In 1935, negotiations on a united front and collaboration between the Bund and the KPP broke off and relations returned to their previous antagonistic state.27 The break with the KPP helped a pro-PPS group within the Bund. It had existed for several years, but, in the mid-1930s, it clearly gained in strength. New threats against Polish Jews appeared, and by 1935 the fate of the Jewish community in Poland had reached a turning point. It was marked by the rise of Hitler and the beginning of the Soviet purges abroad, and by the 1935 authoritarian constitution, the turn to the Right by the government after the death of Pil´sudski, the establishment of the Camp of National Unity (Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego – OZON) in February 1937, and by a new wave of anti-Semitism in Poland. Facing all these threats, the Bund had to change its policy and its attitude towards the Polish state. The Bund became an integral part of the socialist movement in Poland and an important ally in the campaign for democracy.28 The PPS was looking for new allies, as well. After the death of Pil´sudski

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in 1935, the political influence of the National Democrats and the political Right in general quickly grew. The dictatorship in Poland became more and more authoritarian. The PPS tried to stop this process and a defense of democracy gave it new members, new public support, and a new political impetus. In 1935, the PPS protested against a new electoral law and organized a boycott of the Parliamentary elections. Both of these actions, successful everywhere in Poland, were supported by the Bund and other socialist parties of the national minorities. In May 1936, they met at a special conference and agreed on a common economic policy and several joint political goals, like the reconstruction of self-government and the fight for new democratic elections.29 Yet, the PPS leadership was not able to include in its ‘national front’ both the Peasant Party and the Bund. The Peasant Party did not want to work with Jews and adopted a program unfriendly towards them. The Bund did not want to work with the Peasants and supported a united front of the socialist parties, criticized the pro-Peasant leaders of the PPS for ‘reformism,’ and was looking for cooperation with radical Left groups within the PPS.30 The peasant question delayed the PPS–Bund rapprochement. At the same time, it was prompted by the increasing activities of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe) and of the political Right. Anti-Semitism became their main propaganda weapon. The National Democrats claimed that the PPS was a ‘Jewish party’ or that the Jews and communists controlled it. Anti-Semitism became increasingly popular among all social classes. Also, segments of the ruling Pil´sudskiite group accepted the National Democratic style of propaganda. Sometimes local officials informed the government that ‘the Jews and the PPS’ had engaged in some action or another. The PPS leadership understood that the antiSemitic campaign was only a part of a broader phenomenon: the authoritarian crusade against democracy and labor. Even those leaders of the PPS who did not support the idea of cooperation with the Bund, strongly opposed anti-Semitism and started helping the Bund in fighting it. The 1937 Congress of the PPS adopted the following resolution: Behind the anti-semitic slogans, behind the slogans of pogroms, which aim to cheat the masses there lurks the real desire to suppress all progress and democracy.31 After the Przytyk pogrom on March 9, 1936, the Bund was the most active Jewish party involved in a protest against anti-Jewish violence. The PPS press and trade unions supported a half-day strike, organized by the Bund. In 1937, the Bund and the PPS fought together against

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anti-Jewish violence and discrimination at Polish universities. The Bund and the PPS published a common declaration condemning the anti-Jewish riots in Brest-Litovsk, organized the May Day parade in Warsaw, formed joint defense units in Warsaw, published a joint daily newspaper, held common trade union conventions, and organized several other joint actions.32 It appears that the PPS–Bund cooperation reached its zenith in 1937. At its 24th Congress in February 1937, the PPS supported the idea of cultural autonomy for national minorities, including the Jews. The fight against fascism and anti-Semitism became one of the most important goals of the PPS. In 1937, the first talks on unification started. A PPS delegation participated in the 1937 Congress of the Bund. ‘In fact’ – wrote Abraham Brumberg – ‘as time went on, the Bund and the PPS collaborated in a manner that would have been unusual, if not unthinkable, five or ten years earlier.’33 The Polish and Jewish socialists continued these activities in 1938 when they boycotted the election to the Sejm and fought against the fascist Falanga and the governmental, authoritarian Camp of National Unity. Yet, Poland and its political life were already in the shadow of the coming war. An anti-Jewish attitude was present in the PPS as well. In 1937, a top party journalist and publicist, Jan Maurycy Borski, . published a booklet entitled Sprawa zydowska a socjalizm. Polemika z Bundem [The Jewish Problem and Socialism: A Polemic with the Bund]. Borski supported mass-emigration of the Jews from Poland and argued that even after a future victory of socialism a Jewish question and antiSemitism would survive. Many local PPS organizations preferred to cooperate with the Peasant Party rather than with the Bund and even claimed that a close PPS–Bund relationship frightened away a ‘broad public’ from the PPS. In 1939, most May Day parades in large cities were organized ‘without the Jews.’34 Cooperation with the PPS and participation in Polish political life were advantageous to the Bund. From 1935, the Party began to grow again, and it won spectacular victories in several important elections to Jewish communal councils and to city councils in the largest cities of central and northeastern Poland. In the 1938 elections to Warsaw’s City Council the Bund received 17 out of 21 seats taken by Jewish parties. In the last years before World War II, the Bund emerged as the largest Jewish party in Poland with 20 000 registered members. It was much more than a political organization. The Bund maintained numerous educational, economic, cultural, health, and social institutions. It opposed plans for emigration and emphasized that Poland

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was the fatherland of the Polish Jews.35 The Bund was destroyed when it reached the zenith of its power and influence. A famous Bundist leader, Bernard Goldstein, once wrote: ‘It was at the highest point in the Jew’s climb toward recognition as a human being with national and social rights that Hitler struck him down.’36 World War II brought a catastrophe to all the Jews of Poland and to the Bund. Only a small number of Bund members survived the Holocaust. In communist-controlled Poland, the Bund shared the fate of the Polish socialist movement. In 1948, the PPS and the remnants of the Bund were forced to join the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza – PZPR). Many socialists, both Polish and Polish-Jewish, did not accept this decision and, against their beliefs and principles, left Poland. Bernard K. Johnpoll, the author of a classic book on the Polish Bund, The Politics of Futility, opened its conclusion by declaring: ‘The Polish Bund was a political failure’ and argued that the Bund was doomed to failure from the beginning.37 This interpretation appears to be too one-sided. The Bund fought for the improvement of human conditions in Poland, against nationalism and religious fundamentalism, both Jewish and Catholic. It contributed to the defense of democracy in interwar Poland and prompted a progressive transformation of the PPS. It is also difficult to accept Abraham Brumberg’s conclusion: ‘Relations between the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in interwar Poland were characterized by intermittent friction, mutual suspicion, and occasional collaboration alternating with repeated failures to work out a common platform and programs of action.’38 It appears that there was a main tendency in the relationship between the Bund and the PPS. At the beginning, there was conflict and no understanding of their respective national problems and aspirations. Both parties based their accusations on stereotypes and ignorance, were not ready to compromise, did not really try to understand their potential partners, and both underestimated and depreciated each other. Both the PPS and the Bund needed several decades to comprehend that they had more common interests than conflicts of interest. The Bund abandoned its ‘splendid isolation’ within the Jewish community, dropped dogmatic Marxism, and joined Polish political life to fight for Western-style democracy. The PPS, or at least a part of it, finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with national cultural autonomy for the Jews and that anti-Semitism was hurting not only the Jews but the entire Polish society. Both parties made a large step towards Polish–Jewish rapprochement and cooperation.

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Notes 1. The Bund added Lithuania to its name at a later date. 2. B. K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 22–6; J. Bunzl, Klassenkampf in der Diaspora: Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Arbeiterbewegung (Vienna, 1975), pp. 28–67; E. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970), pp. ix–x, 9–48; A. Litvak, ‘Der “bund”,’ in Geklibene shriftn (New York, 1945), p. 164; P. Schwartz, ‘Revolutionary Activities of the Jewish Labor Bund in the Czarist Army,’ YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies, XIII (1965), 229–31; J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 44–52. 3. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 24–7; Bunzl, Klassenkampf, op. cit., pp. 58–78; S. Lambroza, ‘Jewish Self-Defence during the Russian Pogroms of 1903–1906,’ The Jewish Journal of Sociology, XXIII, 2 (December 1981), 123–4; J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1826–1917 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 171; J. Kancewicz, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna w latach 1892–1896 (Warsaw, 1984), p. 120; U. Ignatouski, Istoryia Belarusi (Minsk, 1926), p. 195; E. Goldhagen, ‘The Ethnic Consciousness of Early Russian Jewish Socialists,’ Judaism, XXIII (1974), 481. 4. J. Jurkiewicz, Rozwój polskiej mys´li politycznej na Litwie i Bial ´orusi w latach 1905–1922 (Pozna´n, 1983), p. 31; J. Kancewicz, ‘Dzial´alnos´c´ organizacji warszawskiej PPS w latach 1894–1896,’ Warszawa popowstaniowa . 1864–1918, vol. II (Warsaw, no date), pp. 67–77; H. Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja PPS, 1893–1907 (Wrocl´aw, 1978), p. 39; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, op. cit., p. 33; M. Mishkinsky, ‘Polish Socialism and the Jewish Question on the Eve of the Establishment of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP),’ Polin: A Journal for Polish-Jewish Studies, V (1990), 264; M. S´liwa, ‘Kwestia . . zydowska w polskiej mys´li socjalistycznej,’ Zydzi w Mal´opolsce, ed. F. Kiryk (Przemys´l, 1991), p. 275; L. Blit, The Origins of Polish Socialism: The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party, 1878–1886 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 45; H. J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA, 1972), p. 65; J. Holzer, ‘Polish Political Parties and Antisemitism,’ Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, VIII (1994), 194. 5. U. Hausten, Sozialismus und Nationale Frage in Polen (Cologne, 1969), p. . 340; S´liwa, ‘Kwestia zydowska,’ op. cit., p. 276; Jurkiewicz, Roswój polskiej, op. cit., p. 32. 6. Quoted in Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 38; Robotnik Litewski (Vilna), 2 (March 1987), 80; L. Wasilewski, Zarys dziejów Polskiej Partii Socjalistycznej w zwiazku z historia Socjalizmu polskiego w trzech zaborach i na . ‘ ‘ emigracji (Warsaw, 1920), pp. 58–9; Gl os Z ydowski (April 29, 1906); J. ´ Holzer, ‘Relations between Polish and Jewish Left Wing Groups in Interwar Poland,’ in The Jews in Poland, ed. C. Abramsky, M. Jachimczyk, and A. . Polonsky (Oxford, 1986), p. 140; A. Z arnowska, Geneza rozl ´amu PPS,

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

169

1904–1906 (Warsaw, 1965), p. 40; Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in . Russia, op. cit., p. 44; Bunzl, Klassenkampf, op. cit., pp. 92–3; Z ródl a do ´ dziejow klasy robotniczej na ziemiach polskich, ed. ´ vol. III, part . S. Kalabinski, 1 (Warsaw, 1968), pp. 37, 77–8, 86; Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja PPS, op. cit., p. 73; P. Samus´, ‘The Jewish Community in the Political Life of Lodz in the Years 1865–1914,’ Polin: A Journal of Polish–Jewish Studies, VI (1991), 95–6. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 27; Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, op. cit., p. 72; Bunzl, Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 93; Wasilewski, Zarys dziejów, op. cit., pp. 59, 82–111; L. Wasilewski, Die Judenfrage in KongressPolen (Vienna, 1915), p. 21; J. Nusbaum-Hilarowicz, Pamietniki przyrodnika ‘ (Lvov, no date), p. 33; V. Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, ed. S. Portnoy (New York, 1979), pp. 260, 484–5; D. Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland, 1935–1939,’ Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, IX (1996), 71–2. Archive of the City of Warsaw (Archiwum Miasta Warszawy), Zarzad ‘ Oberpolicmajstra Warszawskiego, file no. 12; Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, op. cit., p. 298; Wasilewski, Zarys dziejów, op. cit., pp. 159–60; Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 32; Bunzl, Klassenkampf, op. . cit., pp. 96–7; H. Piasecki, ‘Z ydowska klasa robotnicza w rewolucji 1905 r.,’ . Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 2 (98) (1976), 42; U. Gl´owacka-Maksymiuk, ‘PPS i Bund w latach rewolucji 1905–1907 roku na terenie guberni siedleckiej,’ Rocznik Mazowiecki, VI (1976), 207–13; B. Mark, . ‘Udzial´ proletariatu zydowskiego w czerwcowym powstaniu ´lódzkim i w . walkach solidarnos´ciowych,’ Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 23 (1957),. 34–6. Piasecki, Z ydowska organizacja PPS, op. cit., pp. 228–9; Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 33–5; Bunzl, Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 101; Archive of the City of Warsaw (Archiwum Miasta Warszawy), Zarza d ‘ Oberpolicmajstra Warszawskiego, file no. 20, document entitled ‘Dzialal´nos´c´ rewolucyjna 1911–1914’; A. Litvak, ‘Lobuzes, ganovim, un kombinatorn, zeyere bagegenishn un tsuzamenshoysn mit der yidisher arbeter-bavegung,’ Royter pinkes, tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeterbavegung un sotsialistishe shtremungen bay yidn, vol. II (Warsaw, 1924), p. 142; Ignatouski, Istoryia Belarusi, op. cit., p. 217. . S´liwa, ‘Kwestia zydowska,’ op. cit., pp. 282–3. Quoted in Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 35. Cf. Medem, The Life and Soul, op. cit., pp. 471–6. S. Dzierzbicki, Pamietniki z lat wojny 1915–1918 (Warsaw, 1983), p. 63; F. ‘ Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden, 1981), pp. 130–3; I. J. Singer, Blood Harvest (London, no date), pp. 73–6. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 46–52; J. Holzer, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna w latach 1917–1919 (Warsaw, 1962), pp. 34, 134. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 54–64. Ibid., pp. 69–75; A. Brumberg, ‘The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in the late 1930s,’ in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Y. Gutman, E. Mendelsohn, J. Reinharz, and C. Shemruk (Hanover and London, 1989), pp. . 76, 81; S´liwa, ‘Kwestia zydowska,’ op. cit., pp. 284–5; A. Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 1921–1939 (Oxford, 1972), p. 95. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 82–120; A. Bel´cikowska,

170

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Stronnictwa i Zwiazki Polityczne w Polsce (Warsaw, 1935), pp. 884–6; J. ‘ Tomicki, ‘The General Union of Jewish Workers (Bund) in Poland, 1918–1939,’ Acta Poloniae Historica, XLV (1982), 100–3; S. Kassow, ‘Jewish Communal Politics in Transition: The Vilna Kehile, 1919–1920,’ YIVO . Annual, XX (1991), 70–2; P. Wróbel, ‘Na równi pochyl´ej. Z ydzi Bial´egostoku w latach 1918–1939: demografia, ekonomika, dezintegracja, konflikty z Polakami,’ Przeglad Historyczny, LXXIX, 2 (1988), 280–1. ‘ 22 Jews were elected to the Parliament by other parties. The PPS gained only 41 deputies out of 444 seats in the Parliament. It was dominated by the political Right, including the National Democrats, who received 163 parliamentary seats. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 128–9. Ibid., pp. 129–41; Brumberg, ‘The Bund,’ op. cit., p. 78; Historia Polski, vol. IV, part 2, ed. T. Jedruszczak (Warsaw, 1978), p. 438. ‘ Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 147–53; Komunikaty Informacyjne Komisariatu Rzadu na Miasto Stol ´eczne Warszawe‘, ed. Ministry ‘ of Interior, vol. I, part 1 (Warsaw, 1991), pp. 65, 186. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 155–8; Komunikaty Informacyjne Komisariatu Rzadu, op. cit., vol. II, part 1 (Warsaw, 1992), p. 131, and vol. ‘ III, part 1 (Warsaw, 1993), p. 63; B. Wachowska, ‘Zarys portretu polity. cznego elektoratu zydowskiego ´Lodzi miedzywojennej w s´wietle ‘ parlamentarnych i samorzadowych kampanii wyborczych 1919–1938,’ . ‘ Dzieje Z ydów w ´Lodzi 1820–1944. Wybrane problemy, ed. W. Pus and S. Liszewski (Lodz, 1991), pp. 243–54. . I. Schiper, A. Tartakower, and A. Haftka (eds), Z ydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, vol. II (Warsaw, 1934), p. 277; Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., p. 60. Komunikaty Informacyjne Komisariatu Rzadu, op. cit., vol. II, part 2 (Warsaw, ‘ 1993), p. 392, and vol. III, part 1, p.. 227. Schiper, Tartakower, and Haftka, Z ydzi Polsce, op. cit., p. 276; Historia Polski, . vol. IV, part 3, ed. T. Je‘druszczak (Warsaw, 1978), p. 447. J. Z arnowski, Polska Partia Socialistyczna w latach 1935–1939 (Warsaw, 1965), p. 19. Tomicki, ‘The General Union,’ op. cit., pp. 104–6; Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., pp. 59–60. B. Gl´owacki, Polityka Polskiej Partii Socialistycznej, 1929–1935 (Warsaw, 1979), pp. 91–2, 190. . Ibid., p. 240; Schiper, Tartakower, and Haftka, Z ydzi Polsce, op. cit., p. 277; . Z arnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., p. 50; Tomicki, ‘The General Union,’ op. cit., pp. 113, 123–4. Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., p. 58; Brumberg, ‘The Bund,’ op. cit., . p. 84. Z arnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 35, 59, 108; S´liwa, ‘Kwestia . zydowska,’ op. cit., p. 286; Wachowska, ‘Zarys portretu,’ op. cit., p. 273; E. Melzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935–1939 (Cincinnati, 1997), p. 18. . Z arnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 85–90; Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., pp. 65–6; J. Holzer, Mozaika polityczna Drugiej Rzeczpospolitej (Warsaw, 1974), pp. 574–6; Tomicki, ‘The General Union,’ op. cit., p. 117; Holzer, Polska Partia, p. 202.

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31. Quoted in J. Cang, ‘The Opposition Parties in Poland and their Attitude towards the Jews and the Jewish Problem,’ Jewish Social Studies, I, 2 (April 1939), 252; Melzer, No Way Out, op. cit., pp. 24–5. . 32. Zarnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 82–4; Brumberg, ‘The Bund,’ op. cit., pp. 85–6; Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., pp. 61–2; J. Marcus, Social and . Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin, 1983), p. 360. 33. Z arnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., p. 175; Brumberg, ‘The Bund,’ op. cit., . ´ p. . 86; Sliwa, ‘Kwestia zydowska,’ op. cit., p. 286. 34. Z arnowski, Polska Partia, op. cit., pp. 310–46; Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., p. 66; Holzer, Polska Partia, op. cit., p. 202; Marcus, Social and Political History, op. cit., p. 402. 35. Blatman, ‘The Bund in Poland,’ op. cit., pp. 62–3, 78–81; R. M. Shapiro, . ‘Wybory do wl´.adz zydowskich gmin wyznaniowych w Polsce w 1936 roku,’ Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 3 (151) (1989), 81–7; Marcus, Social and Political History, op. cit., p. 468. 36. B. Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness (London, 1950), p. 25. 37. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 259. 38. Brumberg, ‘The Bund,’ op. cit., p. 75.

12 Austro-Marxism and the Jews in Galicia John Bunzl

In this chapter I try to return to debates within Austrian Social Democracy a century ago revolving around the questions of how to confront anti-Semitic challenges and how to react to some specifically Jewish political movements. These debates where of socio-cultural and intellectual significance for the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, for the Empire’s periphery, and beyond. A major difficulty resulted from the fact of unequal development, which affected the character of antiSemitic currents as well as the degree of assimilation of the respective Jewish minorities. Another crucial impact derived from the delicate position of Party leaders of Jewish background.

The ‘Jewish Dilemma’ of Austrian Social Democracy The founding years of the Party in Austria coincided with an increasing appearance of a new, aggressive and populist anti-Semitism. Especially in the eighties of the nineteenth century, Social Democrats in Vienna were forced into fierce rivalry with anti-Semitic agitators among the working class. Karl Kautsky wrote in 1884: ‘We have all the trouble to prevent our people from fraternizing with the anti-Semites. The anti-Semites now are our most dangerous enemies, more dangerous than in Germany, because they pose in an oppositionist and democratic fashion, thus meeting the worker’s interests half way.’1 In the same period we find the first attempts at an analytical treatment of the new phenomenon. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is explained by the fear of downward mobility of threatened petit-bourgeois layers. Instead of recognizing capitalism as the force behind processes of social disintegration, anti-Semites presented the Jews as the source for all this misfortune – a personalizing misunderstanding. On the other hand, 172

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analysts discovered also some ‘positive’ aspects of the phenomenon. As an example, I quote from the letter of a Jewish(!) bank clerk who in 1890 wrote to Friedrich Engels: ‘With regards to its effects – not intended by the leaders – there is actually no substitute for anti-Semitism in Austria. It fertilizes the sterile soil of Austrian social thinking.’2 ‘Hatred of capital, even only its Jewish component,’ would serve the proletariat in the end. Engels reacted angrily to this letter in his famous statement to the Arbeiter-Zeitung (May 9, 1890): anti-Semitism would only serve reactionary goals under socialist disguise, social democrats should have nothing to do with it. A basic assumption, however, of both Austrian and German social democracy, was that anti-Semitism was an ideology of vanishing classes. Social development itself – without special efforts of social democracy – would make it disappear, and the party would inherit the harvest: ‘It is our turn as soon as it has gone bankrupt.’3 Most social democratic leaders assumed that Jewish group identity would be dissolved by the same processes which – according to them – led to the disappearance of anti-Semitism.4 Die Neue Zeit (the theoretical journal of the SPD) wrote in 1885: ‘The levelling influence of the new mode of production obliterates also the peculiarities of the so stubborn Jewish race . . . the disappearance of Jewry [Judentum] is only a question of time.’5 It is not surprising that such a prognosis had a negative impact on attitudes toward collective Jewish projects as they developed in Eastern Europe. Two aspects proved decisive: • •

Almost everybody subscribed to the anti-Semitic notion that capitalism was ‘Jewish.’ Leaders of Jewish background (like Victor Adler and Otto Bauer) tried hard not to furnish any pretext to anti-Semitic agitation by defending Jews.

Victor Adler, who had converted to Protestantism in 1878 in order to facilitate assimilation to German culture, proclaimed an equal distance vis-à-vis anti-Semitism and ‘philo-Semitism’ (i.e. capitalism) – and refused on several occasions to defend Jewish groups or individuals.6 Although Otto Bauer remained a member of the organized Jewish community (the Kultusgemeinde), he made an even bigger theoretical effort than Victor Adler, to prove the necessity of Jewish assimilation. ‘Red assimilation’ allowed for integration into a social framework relatively free of anti-Jewish hostility, but the general anti-Semitic climate led to the assumption that it was necessary to give up

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remnants of Jewish identity and to be indifferent vis-à-vis Jewish concerns: either through a ‘neutral’ attitude toward anti-Semitism or through the identification of ‘Jewish characteristics’, which explained even if they did not justify hostility.7 Often the party did not hesitate to turn the tables: in order to counter the notion that social democracy was a ‘Jewish protective guard’ (Judenschutztruppe), the party accused its bourgeois opponents of being a ‘protective guard of Jewish capital’; by posing as more consistent anti-capitalists they also posed as ‘better’ anti-Semites. Already at the Wimberger Party Conference (1897) a Jewish delegate from Bohemia (Jakob Brod) predicted the failure of such exercises with remarkable lucidity: ‘Up to now party tactics consisted in an attempt to avoid any suspicion that the party was Jewified [verjudet]. One only wanted to demonstrate that we are no Jew-servants [Judenknechte]. I tell you, even in a hundred years, we will not convince the philistine [Spießer] of this fact.’8 And Joseph Roth summarized his observations in 1927 with this sober statement: ‘The Social Democrats fear the reputation of a “Jewish party”.’9 Attitudes concerning the Jews in Galicia could not remain unaffected by such assumptions.

Austrian Social Democracy and Jewish national aspirations As the party had difficulties in defending individual civil rights of Jews without reservation it should come as no surprise that its attitude to collective, autonomist Jewish movements within the monarchy’s east was probably even more rejectionist. Nevertheless, analogous aspirations within the Czarist Empire were well received in Vienna – as they were directed against the ‘bulwark of reaction’ in Europe. And the Bund explicitly referred to Austro-Marxist ideas concerning the nationality question. Moreover, it should be remembered that Austro-Marxist arguments found their way into discussions within Russian social democracy through Bundist channels. As Jewish social democracy in Galicia was generally considered as ‘Bundist,’ its status should be seen within this context.10 A crucial role was played by the Brünn Congress of the SDAP in 1899;11 it served as an important point of reference for Bundist ideas. But claims of loyalty to the Brünn resolutions do not stand closer scrutiny. The Brünn Congress proposed a transformation of the historical crownlands into democratized national territories, with additional arrangements for minorities. There can be no doubt as to the territorial basis of the Brünn program. Still it constituted a step towards the recognition of national

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aspirations and towards the development of federal structures within party and state. Only the Slovene delegates demanded an ex-territorial national autonomy – and Bundist conceptions were closest to theirs. The Slovene speaker explicitly referred to the dispersion of his people in Krain, Styria, Carinthia and on the Adriatic coastland. Although the Slovenes (unlike the Jews) had a Kernland, Krain, they would have been at a disadvantage if autonomy was defined territorially. Therefore their speaker, Etbin Kristan, offered this definition of a nation: ‘The nation does not consist of the totality of those who live on a certain territory, but of the sum total of those who speak a certain mother tongue and voluntarily embrace a nationality.’12 He explicitly took exception to the party leadership’s point of view: ‘The executive demands nationally autonomous territories, we demand national autonomy irrespective of the territory.’13 These definitions seemed to correspond to the needs of the ex-territorial people par excellence: the Jews. They were taken up (in a modified form) both by the Bund in Russia and by its Galician counterpart.

Between Vienna and Galicia At the beginning of the century some 800 000 Jews lived in Austrian Galicia, approximately 11 percent of the total population. Their legal status corresponded to the Western European model: the constitution of 1867 defined them as a confessional group and abolished all discriminatory laws. But their social position corresponded more to the Russian model. They continued to live within a ‘socio-economic ghetto.’14 Politically speaking there was no comparison to the pioneering role of Jewish workers in Russia. At first socialist-oriented Jews in Galicia tended to enter the PPSD, which was linked to the PPS. With the rise of the Jewish labour movement in Russia, more and more complaints were voiced by certain of these Jews as to the neglect of Yiddish-speaking proletarians by the Austro-Polish party. Although the PPSD, in 1903, wanted to overcome these shortcomings by a special commission led by Dr H. Diamand, a number of Jewish activists opposed the ‘assimilatory tendencies’ of the Polish party leadership, which in turn warned of Jewish separatism. The implications of the Brünn program as well as agitation by Bundist refugees . contributed finally to the constitution of the Z PS, in Lemberg, in May . of 1905. The Z PS adopted the Brünn program and demanded its application to the Jews, as well as recognition by Austrian Social . Democracy (the Gesamtpartei) of the Z PS as an organization with equal status within the Austrian movement. The second convention of the

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. Z PS, held in Lemberg in 1906, adopted the Bund’s program of national cultural autonomy. In May 1905 the PPSD leadership decided to expell the ‘Separatists’; it condemned the ‘confessional’ split of the party and insisted on the identity of interests of Polish and Jewish workers. ‘Vienna’ essentially supported the Polish arguments and . declared the Z PS to be ‘in fact outside the party.’15 While the . Ukrainian (‘Ruthene’) social democrats recognized the Z PS, because . they wanted to reduce Polish hegemony, the PPSD reproached the Z PS with Germanizing tendencies. Otto Bauer, the leading Austro-Marxist theorist, reacting to the . founding of the Z PS, dedicated a chapter of his monumental The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy (1907) to the ‘Ostjuden.’ To . legitimize its project, the Z PS had claimed language (Yiddish) and culture as the main criteria for Jewish nationhood. It was left unclear if nationhood should apply to all Jews within Austria or be restricted to the Yiddish-speaking, non-assimilated Ostjuden. In any event, Bauer invested great effort in order to prove that in the past, during the Middle Ages, the Jews had in fact constituted a nation, but that they were in the midst of experiencing an unavoidable process of assimilation. He praised the West as a model for the East: bourgeois layers would take the lead, the others would follow. To demand autonomy for the remnants of the Jewish people in Galicia would therefore be wrong, separatist and reactionary.16 Bauer could not ignore the blossoming of Yiddish culture and the development of a Jewish labor movement (especially in Russia), but he insisted: ‘Historically speaking the awakening of the Ostjuden to new cultural life is also nothing but a precursor of ultimate assimilation.’17 Bauer was inconsistent. His own theory of the nation as a ‘community of fate’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) could have been applied to the nonassimilated Jews. While he rejected the introduction of Yiddish-language schools in Galicia as ‘separatist,’ he had no analogous objections to Czech schools in Vienna.18 This inconsistency can be explained (at least partially) by a specifically Jewish desire for assimilation. This wish emanated from sources such as: • •

•

the apparently successful integration of Jews in the West; the fast disappearance of Yiddish among Galician immigrants in Vienna – due (among other factors) to the similarity between German and Yiddish;19 the attempt to hamper a separate Yiddish development in the Eastern parts of the Monarchy; and

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the illusion that the disappearance of Jewish group characteristics would eliminate anti-Semitism.

This bundle of motives prevented Otto Bauer from recognizing the socio-political and cultural potential of a Jewish labor movement within the Empire. He applied the unfortunate theory of ‘peoples without history’ (geschichtslose Völker), developed by Marx and Engels half a century earlier, to the contemporary Ostjuden. The Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky has probably given the best answer to such reasoning.20

Conclusion In spite of his general theories, Otto Bauer (and the SDAP leadership) opposed any concession to the idea of a separate Eastern-Jewish nationality in Galicia: they insisted that there should be no statesupported Jewish schools and that Yiddish should not be recognized officially.21 Institutional autonomy of Jewish workers was also rejected. Max Adler on the Left margin of the SDAP and Engelbert Pernerstorfer on the SDAP’s Right, supported autonomist or Zionist endeavours – albeit out of different motives. 22 However, such views were exceptional. Intending to reduce the Party’s (and their own) vulnerability, the SDAP leadership aimed at a maximum Jewish assimilation in order to remove the presumed occasion of anti-Semitic agitation. Thus its behavior was not markedly different from that of other sections of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna.

Notes 1. B. Kautsky (ed.), Friedrich Engels’ Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky (Vienna, 1955), p. 125 2. E. Hanisch, ‘Friedrich Engels und der Antisemitismus in Wien’, Archiv. Mitteilungsblatt des Vereins für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 4 (1975), 116–21. 3. A. Bebel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus (Berlin, 1906). 4. P. W. Massing, Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1959), p. 171. 5. Review of Gedanken eines Juden, Die Neue Zeit, III (1885), 284. 6. J. Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York, 1992), pp. 86ff.

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7. R. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria–Hungary (East Brunswick, NJ, 1982), p. 334. 8. J. Bunzl, ‘Arbeiterbewegung, “Judenfrage,” und Antisemitismus. Am Beispiel des Wiener Bezirks Leopoldstadt,’ in Bewegung and Klasse. Studien zur österreichischen Arbeitergeschichte, ed. G. Botz, H. Hautmann, H. Konrad, and J. Weidenholzer (Vienna, 1978), p. 759. 9. J. Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin, 1927), as reprinted in Orte. Ausgewählte Texte (Leipzig, 1990). 10. J. Bunzl, Klassenkampf in der Diaspora. Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Arbeiterbewegung (Vienna, 1975), pp. 120f. 11. R. Löw, Der Zerfall der ‘Kleinen Internationale.’ Nationalitätenkonflikte in der Arbeiterbewegung des alten Österreich (1889–1914) (Vienna, 1984), pp. 37f. 12. F. Rozman, ‘Etbin Kristan und seine Idee der Personalautonomie,’ in Arbeiterbewegung und nationale Frage in den Nachfolgestaaten der Habsburgermonarchie, ed. H. Konrad (Vienna, 1993), p. 99. 13. E. Fröschl, M. Mesner, and U. Ra’anan (eds), Staat und Nation in multiethnischen Gesellschaften (Vienna, 1991), p. 103. 14. M. Anin, ‘Ist die Assimilation der Juden möglich?,’ Sozialistische Monatshefte, XII, part 2 (1908), 614f. 15. Bunzl, Klassenkampf in der Diaspora, op. cit., pp. 119f. 16. Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx, pp. 105f. 17. O. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna, 1907), p. 377. 18. E. Traverso, Les Marxistes et la question juive (Montreuil, 1990), p. 97. 19. K. Hödl, Als Bettler in die Leopoldstadt. Galizische Juden auf dem Weg nach Wien (Vienna, 1994), especially pp. 167f. 20. R. Rosdolsky, ‘Friedrich Engels und das Problem der “geschichtslosen Völker”,’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, IV (1964), 87–282. 21. G. Stourzh, ‘Galten die Juden als Nationalität Altösterreichs?,’ Studia Judaica Austriaca, X (1984) 22. While Max Adler favored a comprehensive concept of human emancipation, Pernerstorfer perceived Jewish self-segregation as a confirmation of his German nationalist views.

13 German Social Democrats and Polish Bundists in Exile in London, 1939–45: Memories Susanne Miller

I must explain first that I am not going to deliver an academic paper. I’ve been given permission to talk about my own memories. I had the great privilege of meeting some Bundists in exile in England and in America. They impressed me deeply and I feel very honored to be able to talk about them. But first of all I have to say a few words about the situation in exile. Great Britain was an island of refuge for all of the persecuted after the Nazi invasion of Europe. England was a refuge and it was also an assembly point, a kind of unofficial Socialist International. But the German and the Austrian social democrats were not equally included. I myself come from Vienna, but during the clerical fascist time and, after that, the Nazi period I lived in England. I had close friends there. They became members of the Labour Party and they joined a small group of German refugees who were left-wing socialists and who had been expelled in the middle of the twenties from the SPD. The chairman of this group was Willi Eichler. Nearly all the members of the group joined the SPD after the war, including Willi Eichler, whose secretary I was and whom I married later. I worked in a restaurant in London, but in my spare time I acted also as a political secretary. After the war, Willi Eichler was the chairman of the commission that prepared the Godesberg program. The first Bundist we met was Shmuel Zygielbaum who, after he had fled from Poland, and, as far as I know, had walked through Germany, reached Great Britain. He came to our group and we spoke about his own organization – the Bund – and his own experiences in meeting some friends in Germany. Our group was composed of non-Jews and some Jews, but they all had the same ignorance about Polish Bundists and to a certain extent also about Zionism. Shmuel Zygielbaum made a deep impression on our group, which I remember to this day. Shmuel 179

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Zygielbaum’s suicide was mentioned before by other speakers at the conference at the Bund’s 100th anniversary. But I am sorry to say that his suicide was not a signal, not in England and I am afraid nowhere in the world, to help the Jews in Poland or anywhere else, whether they were persecuted by the Nazis and/or by anti-Semites in the countries in which they lived. We noted the words of Shmuel Zygielbaum, that after the end of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising his place was with his dead comrades, with deep sympathy and grief. But we were equally deeply grieved and shocked by how little impression his suicide and disappearance from the world made in reality. The second Bundist we met in our group and whom I also met personally was Lucjan Blit. He had been with Alter and Erlich in Kujbyszew and he told us of that terrible evening when one of the two was called to the telephone to be ordered to go to some official place in Kujbyszew. Neither of them was seen again. Willi Eichler – my husband – wrote an article on Alter and Erlich in a British socialist paper. It was mentioned here [during the conference on ‘the Bund at 100’ in Warsaw] that the horrible fate of Alter and Erlich shocked the world. There still are those who know who they were and what they meant to the social-democratic world, what they meant to their own comrades. I cannot remember, however, that in the British press and among the British public this terrible crime – one of the worst crimes Stalin committed – really made a deep and lasting impression. The chairman of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) visited Russia shortly after the incarceration of Alter and Erlich. And there is a legend – I don’t know if it’s true but even legends have their meaning – that the chairman of the AFL met Stalin and asked him for a favor: to free Alter and Erlich. And the legend has it that Stalin replied: ‘There are 20 000 000 prisoners in Soviet Russia. How am I to find these two Jews among them?’ Whether it is true or not, this legend circulated in the emigrant circles at that time and the tragic fact is that Alter and Erlich were not freed and we have never seen them again. I would like to say an additional word about Lucjan Blit, because I think he was one of the few emigrants, not merely one of the Bundists, who really became integrated into the political life of his country of refuge. Lucjan Blit became a journalist and a lecturer on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe. He married a British school teacher, a very fine, educated woman, Barbara Blit, and it was a very fortunate circumstance for both Lucjan and Barbara that Lucjan’s two daughters, who had been hidden in Poland by non-Jewish families, came to England and the two evidently found their feet. One of them went to America; the other stayed in England. Lucjan Blit became a really respected

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British journalist and lecturer. I think he always remained aware of his roots, his Bundist and Jewish past. We were friends. He wanted to go to the Netherlands for his studies. He wrote, also, on the history of the Bund and he wanted to study in Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History, and he promised me that on the way to Amsterdam he would visit me, but unfortunately he died before he could do what he intended to do. He had many friends in England. And I know that his wife and his daughter continue this friendship. Another highly respected Bundist whose memory I deeply cherish was Emanuel Scherer, who was for a time in England and who then went to New York. He became the editor of the journal Unzer tsayt. Emanuel Scherer had in many respects quite a different temperament than Lucjan. While Lucjan really found his basis in England, Emanuel Scherer lived in the past. This past was a deep, deep sorrow to him. He had lost his country, his comrades and friends, and his personal tragedy also was that his wife died in New York. Before my talk there was a paper delivered on the Bund and the Socialist International. My contact with Emanuel Scherer convinced me that for Bundists to belong to the Socialist International meant a very, very deep loyalty and solidarity with other social democrats. In 1973 the Socialist International decided that those parties which belonged to the Socialist International but which were no longer active in their own countries should no longer be members of the Socialist International but rather be observers. At the end of 1975 I received a letter from Emanuel Scherer in which he wrote that he had heard about the intention to exclude the Bundists, who, up to then, were regular members of the Socialist International. This was a decision that he could not accept and that he could not understand. ‘They’ve destroyed my country, they’ve murdered my people and I should also be excluded from the Social Democratic International?’ – this was the content of his letter. The purpose of his letter was to ask me to do something against this decision. The driving force for the exclusion of the Bundists was the Labour Party of Israel. In 1976 Willy Brandt became chairman of the Socialist International. I turned to him for help. And I had the impression that he was very sympathetic to these concerns and to the request of Emanuel Scherer that the Bund be allowed to remain a full member of the Socialist International. Unfortunately, the vote to exclude the Bund from the Socialist International went through against the efforts of Willy Brandt. I received a postcard from Emanuel Scherer from Geneva, where the relevant meeting of the International took place, containing only two

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sentences. The first one expressed deep grief about the decision and the other sentence was: ‘Willy Brandt was wonderful.’ Emanuel Scherer died a few years later and I think that of the tragedies he had experienced in his life, the exclusion from the Socialist International, although it was a symbolic act, was one of the deepest. Since my subject is the relationship between Bundists and German Social Democrats, let me mention two more events. When the refugees from Hitler in France were trapped in southern France and needed help, especially from American friends, the Bundists were one of the foremost advocates of rescue for the socialists. The other event took place in 1947 at a Socialist conference in Zürich, Switzerland. The conference discussed the rebuilding of the Socialist International. Kurt Schumacher, accompanied by Fritz Henssler, another prominent German Social Democrat, participated in the conference. The Germans applied to rejoin the Socialist International, but their application was rejected. This happened despite the fact that Schumacher had suffered for over ten years in a Nazi concentration camp. The Bundist representatives at the conference did not vote against admitting the Germans, they abstained from voting. When this was discussed among German Social Democrats, they were moved by this gesture of the Bundists. In 1951 the International was refounded in Frankfurt. I think the relations between the Bundists and the German Social Democrats were relations of comradeship. German Social Democrats were invited to congresses of the Bund and Willi Eichler took part in a congress in Canada. You will understand that these memories of the Bundists are unforgettable for me. I am grateful that I can share them with you.

14 The Bund and the Labour and Socialist International Mario Kessler

The Bund and the LSI: proletarian emancipation and national emancipation The Labour and Socialist International (LSI), founded in May 1923, was the international organization of the social democratic parties until the Second World War. From the very beginning the LSI was confronted with numerous problems. The problem of Jewish emancipation was one of the main issues the international labor movement dealt with from the late nineteenth century forward. The Bund, as a radical revolutionary party, had no other choice but to join the LSI since the Bund’s conception of national emancipation of the Jews was incompatible with the assimilationist perspective of the Comintern. Within the LSI the Bund was confronted with the activities of leftwing Zionists. All these constellations led to debates and conflicts. From the time of its foundation in 1897 the Bund was concerned with the future of the Jews in the countries in which they lived, i.e. in Eastern and East Central Europe. The Jewish workers, the Bund insisted, should fight against anti-Semitism together with their non-Jewish comrades. The leading Bundists saw their party as the representative of the Jewish workers within the general labor movement. In the course of the revolutionary struggles against Czarism before 1914 the Bund no longer remained only a workers’ party; it had also become a national party. Its strength lay in the search for a dialectical synthesis between proletarian internationalism and the defense of an oppressed national culture. ‘The Bund’s militants,’ as Enzo Traverso summed up, ‘placed their internationalism in a Jewish national tradition; they considered it possible and necessary to struggle for the liberation of the Russian [and Polish] Jews within the perspective of a world socialist revolution.’1 183

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Unlike the Zionists, the Bund made no demand for a Jewish territory, nor did it support assimilation. The Bundists fought for full civic equality of the Jewish people and for the right of this people to develop its historical and cultural identity through its own language and institutions. They sought acceptance instead of tolerance, and equality for ordinary people. Within the labor movement in Czarist Russia, and later in independent Poland, and in the International, the Bund worked for unity between Jewish and non-Jewish workers, and emphasized the right to represent the interests of the Jewish workers within the movement. As is well known, this attitude brought the Bund into sharp opposition with the Bolsheviks and their concept of unity and amalgamation, which excluded a separate revolutionary party for Jewish workers. Therefore, the Bund left the Second Congress of the RSDRP in 1903 when its minimal conditions for adherence to the party were rejected.

The Bund and the International: the beginning of the debate before 1914 At the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900, delegates of the Bund formed the largest single bloc within the Russian delegation.2 Four years later, at the Amsterdam Congress of the International, the RSDRP, the Social Revolutionaries and the Bund sent their own delegations to the Congress. Each party demanded to be given one of the two votes accorded to the Russian section. The Bund rejected Chaim Zhitlovsky’s proposal to establish an independent Jewish section, as it did not define itself as a representative of a worldwide Jewish nation, but rather as a Russian Jewish party, deserving of a vote within the Russian section. Therefore, it requested a third vote for the Russian section from the International Socialist Bureau (ISB). This request was denied by the ISB, and the Bund therefore claimed the seat within the Russian section which had also been claimed by the Social Revolutionaries. Only a minority of the ISB members, like Victor Adler, supported the Bund’s demand. Even after the Bund’s merger with the RSDRP in 1906, the Bund made a further attempt to gain representation in the International as an autonomous body, but it failed again. ‘The rebuffs to the Bund in 1904 and 1906 notwithstanding,’ as Jack Jacobs writes, the Jewish party was respected by many of the other parties represented in the International, and had some impact on matters of

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direct concern to it, such as the debates within the International on emigration and immigration. Respect for the Bund, and the long standing ties it had already established with other socialist parties in the International by 1907, also played a role . . . when the International was confronted with requests for admission from other Jewish socialist parties, i.e. the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party [SS] . . . the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party [SERP], and the Poalei Zion.3 In 1907, the three Zionist and territorialist parties mentioned by Jacobs called for the establishment of a Jewish Section, a demand which followed from their claims that the Jewish proletariat was entitled to the same rights as proletarians of other nationalities. The Bund, reacting negatively, argued that such a section was impossible as well as undesirable. Its spokesmen, Vladimir Medem and Vladimir Kossovsky, pointed out that the International was a political organization, concerned only with political issues. No extra-territorial peoples could be admitted.4 On the eve of the Stuttgart Congress of the International in 1907, the SERP became a sub-section of the Social Revolutionaries and thereby gained a consultative vote for the Congress.5 During the same congress, the ISB decided to give a consultative vote to the SS, a decision which the Bureau overturned a year later.6 The struggle to establish a Jewish Section within the International lasted until 1911. The Poalei Zion led this struggle – against the strict opposition of the Bund – and directed several memoranda to the International, demanding national representation for the Jewish proletariat within the framework of an independent section. Finally, in 1911, the Poalei Zion, the SS, and the SERP addressed a joint appeal to the ISB that emphasized the national character of the Jewish people, and its historical and psychological unity. The appeal was not successful because of the position taken by the Bund and because of the ongoing refusal of the International to accept extra-territorial parties.7

Opposition to Zionism and to Bolshevism: the Bund and the international Social Democratic movement between the World Wars The Bund belonged to those segments of the International which opposed the war in 1914. It continued to oppose Zionist representation within the ISB (to which the Poalei Zion was admitted in 1916).8 In December 1917, the British Labour Party formulated the final draft of its War Aims Memorandum, which contained a clause stating that:

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The British Labour movement demands for the Jews in all countries the same elementary rights of tolerance, freedom of residence and trade and equal citizenship that ought to be extended to all the inhabitants of every nation. It furthermore expresses the opinion that Palestine should be set free from the harsh and oppressive government of the Turk, in order that this country may form a Free State, under international guarantee to which such of the Jewish people as desire to do so may return, and may work out their salvation free from interference by those of alien race or religion.9 The statement, as vague as it was with regard to the right of the Jews to ‘return’ to Palestine, and with regard to the character of the ‘Free State’ which it endorsed, was essentially favorable to Zionism and constituted the first official support of Zionist aspirations given by a British political party. The Bund reacted promptly. Its spokesman, Henryk Erlich, protested sharply during a meeting with British Labour politicians against this passage of the so-called Henderson–Webb Declaration. He underlined the Bund’s demand for equal rights for the Jews and emphasized that the Labour Party ought to add a demand for national cultural autonomy to the declaration. The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, as Erlich pointed out, would mean that the Arab majority there would fall under the domination of a handful of Jewish chauvinists. The statement of the Labour Party, Erlich pointed out, had an imperialistic odor. Moreover, a Jewish state in the Middle East would endanger the Jewish struggle for equal civil rights in Europe. Kossovsky characterized the Zionist attempt to establish a Jewish state in Palestine as ridiculous, insofar as the Arabs were and would remain an absolute majority of that land’s population. The British Labour Party, Kossovsky charged, was unable to break with bourgeois ideology; its leaders remained ‘opportunists’ and were unable to understand what Marxism and socialism really meant.10 The Bund’s rejection of the plan to re-establish the Second International after the First World War did not surprise anyone. The bulk of those Bundists who remained outside the Soviet Republic after 1917 eventually opposed even more strongly the Bolshevik project of establishing a Third, Communist, International. Inside Russia, the majority of the Bundists declared a boycott of the elections for the Second Soviet Congress and declared their opposition to the new regime at the eighth Bund Congress in December 1917. During the Civil War with its murderous pogroms, many Russian and Ukrainian

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Jews saw in the Red Army their sole hope of salvation, and began therefore gradually to move from being openly hostile to the October Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, to substantial loyalty and even support. This shift initiated the transformation of Jewish socialism, which eventually led to the destruction of an independent Jewish labor movement outside the Bolshevik Party. Within the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks concerned with Jewish affairs made splitting the Bund a top priority and were ultimately successful.11 The Bund in Poland also split. The pro-Soviet Bundist minority constituted itself as the Kombund and, together with the proCommunist offspring of the Poalei Zion, joined the Comintern between 1921 and 1923. The Jewish Workers’ Bund of Poland decided not to join the LSI, which was founded in May 1923 in Hamburg as a successor to the Second International. Thus, unlike most of the forces which were until then united in the Vienna Union (the so-called Second-and-a-half International), the Bund remained independent of both of the two major camps in the international labor movement in the interwar period: the Communist and the Social Democratic Internationals. Very few other workers’ parties, of which the Norwegian Workers’ Party was the most influential, adopted a parallel stance. Nevertheless, the Bundist leaders commented critically on the policy of the LSI. The two central issues on the agenda of the LSI of concern to the Bund were the attitude of the international labor movement towards Zionism, and the prospects of the Jews in Palestine. As in the years before 1914, the Bund was in strict opposition to Zionism in general and to the Poalei Zion in particular. This attitude was clearly summed up in a letter by Erlich to Friedrich Adler, the secretary of the LSI, dated September 24, 1929. Erlich reminded Adler of the ‘pro-Zionist statements and actions of certain European labour leaders,’ particularly Emile Vandervelde, a Belgian Socialist, and the Frenchman Léon Blum.12 Vandervelde was a member of a delegation of prominent LSI representatives who tried to inform the International about the situation of Polish workers under the Pil´sudski regime. Erlich criticized Vandervelde, ‘who held the mandate of the International as a whole,’ for having thought ‘it possible to set himself in blunt opposition to the Jewish working class of Poland,’ and for acting against the expressed will of the Polish section of the International, the PPS. Knowing that Vandervelde had expressed his support for Zionism in general and for labor Zionism in Palestine in particular,13 Erlich,

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accompanied by Niedzial´kowski, said to Vandervelde immediately after his arrival in Warsaw: It is very far from my intention to question your personal freedom of opinion in the matter of Zionism. If you should find the time during your stay in Warsaw to have a friendly discussion with us in a closed meeting we are always ready to take up the discussion on this subject, and we shall be glad to be able to make clear to you our anti-Zionist point of view. But will you please consider the situation in which you will place yourself and us with your pro-Zionist demonstration. In Poland there is no other Jewish Socialism than the ‘Bund’. We represent the great majority of the Jewish working class of Poland. Anything in the ranks of the Jewish workers here which is not connected with the ‘Bund’, is Communist, which means antiZionist. The so-called ‘Jewish Socialists’ (Poale Zion), who are affiliated to the Socialist International are an absolute cipher in Poland. Erlich, as he reported to Adler, insisted to Vandervelde: Zionism in Poland is a clerical, chauvinist, reactionary Jewish bourgeoisie, which is an integral part of the general Polish reaction, and is in a constant and most dour struggle with Jewish and Polish Socialism. You cannot be the guest of the Jewish working class and of the Zionists in Poland at the same time. What would you say if a prominent member of the International were to come to Brussels and take part there in a demonstration in favour of the Liberal or the Catholic Party? At the time of Erlich’s letter, the Bund and the PPS had formed an electoral bloc for the local elections in Tarnów. ‘It was precisely at this time,’ Erlich continued, ‘that Comrade Vandervelde thought it reasonable, in spite of the Polish Socialist Party and the “Bund”, to give effect to the invitation of the Jewish bourgeois politicians, and to announce publicly his enthusiasm for Zionism.’ In July and August 1929 the 16th Zionist Congress, which founded the Jewish Agency, took place in Zürich. One of the prominent Socialists who was engaged in forming the Jewish Agency was Léon Blum. Erlich criticized harshly Blum’s ‘disgraceful speech in which [he] assured the Rabbis and the Jewish money-bags that they could fully

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count upon the support of the Socialist International. . . . A greater insult for the Jewish working class is absolutely unthinkable!’ Erlich’s bitter letter had just been written when the terrible news of bloody fights in Palestine arrived. The events of August 1929 in Palestine, during which Arab and Jewish militants clashed head-on, cost hundreds of people their lives; several hundred more were wounded on both sides, and the atmosphere between Arabs and Jews was poisoned for years. In a postscript to the above-mentioned letter, Erlich asked: Who is to blame for all these tragic events? It is certain that British Imperialism which has exclusively followed its own interests in Palestine, is playing an unworthy, a hypocritical game with the Zionists and with the Arabs. British Imperialism has known how to squeeze the full use out of its mandate and of the Balfour declaration. It has calmly left the Zionists to revel in their exaggerated hopes, and has prepared for itself in the Jewish colonisation in Palestine a scape-goat, a lightning conductor against the anger of the Arabs. He concluded: We must make not only British Imperialism, not only Arab fanaticism, but also Zionism share the responsibility for this. May the Zionists in the International at last learn something from the recent events. May they cease from supporting the pernicious work of Zionism, because the Jewish working masses are the only ones who pay for this.14 This characterization of the August events was quite similar to the first statements made on this issue by the Palestinian Communist Party. The outbreak of the disturbances came as a complete surprise to the leadership of the PCP. On the eve of the first bloody outbreaks the party had issued a leaflet which was pacifist in tone.15 A leaflet issued right after the beginning of the riots characterized the troubles as an imperialist provocation, and indicated that Britain, afraid of the possible unity of Arab and Jewish workers, was instigating racial hatred to divide the two communities, and was aided in this by Zionist leaders and by Arab effendis. The leaflet of the PCP called on Arab and Jewish workers to stop their fraternal fight.16 Joseph Berger-Barzilai, the deputy secretary of the PCP, characterized the events both as a

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‘pogrom’ and as a ‘general Arab uprising.’17 But only the latter dimension was considered in the statement on the events of 1929 issued by the Political Secretariat of the ECCI.18 Unlike the Comintern, the LSI did not issue an official resolution about the Palestine events, but Friedrich Adler made his negative attitude to Zionism very clear on other occasions.19 He wrote to Erlich: But your letter has made me conscious again that the fact that the ‘Bund’ still holds aloof from the mass organization of the international proletariat which finds expression in the L.S.I. is a pity not only for the Labour movement in Poland but for the whole International. It should be your own special task to represent in the L.S.I. the interests of the great masses of the Jewish proletariat outside Palestine, and you should not be surprised if misunderstandings come out, as you do not help to give the non-Zionist part of the Jewish working class the representation due to them in the L.S.I.20 Adler reminded Erlich of an LSI executive declaration of August 1928, which stressed ‘the importance of winning over also the Jewish Bund for close co-operation with the other socialist parties of Poland’ and instructed the LSI secretariat ‘in case of necessity to offer its services towards this end at the appropriate moment.’ Adler expresses his ‘view’ to the Bundists that they ‘cannot expect the whole L.S.I. to be of your [the Bundists’] opinion.’ However, they ‘would in no way be isolated in the L.S.I.’ On the contrary, the Bund’s entering into the International ‘would strengthen precisely those parties whose views closely approximate to your [the Bund’s] own.’ Adler certainly had in mind his own party, the SDAP.21 Erlich responded to Adler on November 8. He informed him that Adler’s letter arrived just as the Bund’s Party Committee was meeting. The meeting’s agenda included a proposal to call an extraordinary party conference to decide upon the affiliation of the Bund to the LSI. During this discussion, Erlich informed the Committee of the contents of the letters between the two politicians, and a resolution was passed, which stated: ‘The Central Committee is instructed to place the question of affiliation to the L.S.I. before the Party in the near future.’ Nineteen committee members voted for the proposal, and seventeen against, while one abstained from voting.22 The small minority held by the pro-LSI faction within the Bund’s leadership demonstrated that it still had to convince significant portions of the party membership that affiliation with the LSI was desirable. One

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reason for skepticism concerning the LSI within the Bund was the longstanding tension between the Bund and the PPS, which had been an LSI member since the foundation of the new International. Another reason for skepticism was an undercurrent of hope for an international workers’ organization which both opposed Social Democracy and Communism while endorsing a left-wing socialist perspective.23 The relationship between the Bund and the PPS improved considerably when the PPS sent the editor of its daily paper Robotnik as its delegate to the Bund convention held in March 1929 in Warsaw. The PPS now helped to ease the way into the International by calling for close cooperation between the two organizations and by backing the Bund’s demand that Jewish workers be granted job guarantees. In June 1930 a special convention of the Bund was held in Lodz to discuss and to decide the question of affiliation with the LSI. By a margin of 60 to 43 the Bund voted in favor of affiliation. The minority, it was reported, was embittered and refused to accept minority representation on the presidium.24 The resolution on affiliation stated that the Comintern is ideologically bankrupt and plays a deleterious role in the labor movement; the International Information Bureau [of left-wing parties outside the Comintern, seated in Paris] has failed, after seven years, to become a center for revolutionary Socialist parties, and the Socialist International has grown because of a growing desire among the non-Communist Socialist parties for unity. The Socialist International now includes all of the divisions in the Socialist movement except the Communists and [the International] allows each to exist within its ranks.25 The minority proposed an alternative resolution, which declared opposition to reformism and Communism. Erlich, speaking for the majority, declared that an LSI membership would not mean ideological capitulation. ‘We remain as much opposed to reformism as to Communism.’26 With the exception of only one delegate the minority temporarily left the conference, but came back soon to prevent a split of the organization. Erlich repeated that the supporters of affiliation would ‘make no effort to create any illusions about the Socialist International . . . we see all of its errors.’27 The Bund confirmed this attitude during the following years. Its political program, the Ideological Declaration of February 14, 1935, criticized sharply the policy of the Soviet Union but expressed the

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hope that the Soviet regime would change and that it would become a partner in the struggle for Socialism. The Bund accepted the dictatorship of the proletariat as a temporary stage after the revolution, insofar as its organs could be controlled by the masses.28 It opposed the popular front policy inaugurated by the Comintern and emphasized the unity of all socialist forces. The Bund protested openly and clearly against the Moscow show trials which annihilated the elite of the Bolshevik leadership. It demasked the World Congress of Jewish Culture held in Paris 1937 as a Stalinist maneuver and a ‘mish-mash’ which even included some rabbis.29 Through this radical criticism the Bund became one of the more leftwing parties within the LSI. The revolutionary socialism of the Bund lay outside the social-democratic mainstream of the late 1930s, and obviously had much more in common with those radical socialist and communist tendencies outside the two Internationals, the German exile groups KPDO and SAPD, or the Polish Bolshevik–Leninists (who were strongly influenced by Leon Trotsky and other Marxist dissidents) than with most of the parties in the LSI. Whatever the Bund’s differences with the LSI may have been, however, all of the parties, segments and fractions of the Jewish labor movement in Poland were finally exterminated by the most horrible enemy of socialism and of humankind: by German Nazism, which brought the history of the Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland to a bloody end.

Notes 1. E. Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate, 1843–1943 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1994), p. 100. 2. See E. Mendelsohn, ‘The Jewish Socialist Movement and the Second International, 1889–1914: The Struggle for Recognition,’ Jewish Social Studies, XXVI, 3 (1964), 131–45; M. Kessler, Zionismus und internationale Arbeiterbewegung 1894 bis 1933 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 85–100; J. Jacobs, ‘Die Sozialistische Internationale, der Antisemitismus und die jüdisch-sozialistischen Parteien des Russischen Reiches,’ in Ausblicke auf das vergangene Jahrhundert: Die Politik der internationalen Arbeiterbewegung von 1900 bis 2000. Festschrift für Theodor Bergmann, ed. W. Hedeler, M. Kessler, and G. Schäfer (Hamburg, 1996), pp. 156–68. 3. Jacobs, ‘Die Sozialistische Internationale,’ op. cit., p. 160 (cited from the English manuscript). 4. See W. Medem, ‘Ein nationalistischer Vorschlag,’ Die Neue Zeit, XXVIII, part 2 (1910), 748–51.

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5. See A. Tartakower, ‘Zur Geschichte des jüdischen Sozialismus,’ Der Jude, VIII, 7 (1924), 397. 6. Cf. Mendelsohn, ‘The Jewish Socialist Movement,’ op. cit., pp. 141–2; N. Weinstock, Le Pain de misère: L’histoire du mouvement ouvrier juif en Europe, vol. I (Paris, 1984), pp. 229ff. 7. See Mendelsohn, ‘The Jewish Socialist Movement,’ op. cit., p. 144. 8. See Tartakower, ‘Zur Geschichte,’ op. cit., VIII, 11, 642. 9. Cited from G. Shimoni, ‘Poale Zion: A Zionist Transplant in Britain (1905–1945),’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. II, ed. P. Y. Medding (Bloomington, Indiana, 1986), p. 232. 10. See A. Gelbard, Der Jüdische Arbeiterbund Rußlands im Revolutionsjahr 1917 (Vienna, 1982), pp. 65–6. 11. Cf. M. Kessler, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Eastern European Jewish Labour Movement,’ International Politics, XXXIII, 4 (1996), 417–29; M. Kessler, ‘Die Russische Revolution und die jüdische Arbeiterbewegung,’ in Der Widerschein der Russischen Revolution: Ein kritischer Rückblick auf 1917 und die Folgen, ed. T. Bergmann, W. Hedeler, M. Kessler, and G. Schäfer (Hamburg, 1997), pp. 93–106. 12. All quotations from Erlich’s letter to Adler, dated September 24, 1929, are from the following source: Archiwum Lewicy Polskiej (ALP), Warsaw, II Miedzynarodówka, sign. 150/IV-25 h, pp. 169–72. The German version of this letter can be found in Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam, LSI Archive, No. 356, pp. 3–7. 13. Emile Vandervelde expressed his viewpoint, for example in ‘Die jüdischen Siedlungen in Palästina,’ Die Gesellschaft, V, 2 (1928), 163–71; Emile Vandervelde, Le pays d’Israël: Un marxiste en Palestine (Paris, 1929), German edn: Schaffendes Palästina (Dresden, 1930). 14. ALP, sign. 150/IV-25 h, p. 172. 15. ‘Do not change the Wailing Wall to a wall of hatred between you,’ Hebrew leaflet of the CC/PCP, quoted in M. Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919–1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (London, 1979), p. 28. 16. More details about the 1929 events in Palestine can be found in M. Kessler, ‘Die Augustereignisse 1929 in Palästina, die KP Palästinas und die Kommunistische Internationale,’ asien-afrika-lateinamerika, XIX, 3 (1991), 517–29; reprinted in M. Kessler, Antisemitismus, Zionismus und Sozialismus. Arbeiterbewegung und jüdische Frage im 20. Jahrhundert (Mainz, 1993), pp. 66–80. 17. J.B., ‘Das Blutbad im “Heiligen Land”,’ Internationale Pressekorrespondenz [Inprekorr], September 6, 1929, 2092. 18. See ‘Resolution des Politsekretariats des EKKI zur Aufstandsbewegung in Arabistan,’ Inprekorr (January 30, 1930), 258–61. 19. Cf. Adler’s letter to Marc Jarblum, January 30, 1930; in ALP, 150/IV-26, pp. 10–11; IISG, LSI Archive, no. 355, pp. 32–3. 20. Adler to Erlich, October 15, 1929; ALP, 150/IV-25 h, p. 13; IISG, LSI Archive, no. 356, p. 8. 21. Ibid. 22. ALP, 150/IV-26, p. 174; IISG, LSI Archive, no. 356, pp. 8–9. 23. See P. Merchav, Linkssozialismus in Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen

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(Vienna, 1979). 24. Cf. B. K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 185–7; H. Minczeles, Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif (Paris, 1995), pp. 363–4. 25. Der veker, IX (June 28, 1930), 10–11; quoted in Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 187. 26. Quoted in ibid., p. 188 (from the same source). 27. Nayer folkstsaytung, June 6, 1930; quoted in ibid., p. 189. 28. Cf. W. Kowalski et al., Geschichte der Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Internationale (1923–1940) (Berlin, 1985), p. 318. 29. ALP, 150/IV-50, p. 16.

Part IV The Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Years

15 The National Ideology of the Bund in the Test of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, 1933–47 Daniel Blatman

Jewish nation – Jewish nationhood The traditional categorization of the Bund on the question of ‘nationhood’ and ‘class’ has cast this movement, from its inception, into a singular framework in which the idea of Jewish cultural autonomism is merged into a Marxist political worldview. The Bund ideology never recognized the world-spanning nature of the ‘Jewish problem’ or an inclusive, shared Jewish interest. In the Bundist ideology, the ‘Jewish people’ is an entity that, although endowed with linguistic and cultural characteristics, has never had a common national, let alone ethnic, element. Until its national ideological infrastructure coalesced, the Bund followed an unbroken path of disputes and confrontations with sister socialist parties in Eastern Europe. Each of these parties – such as the RSDRP, the PPS, and the SDKPiL – ruled out, in its own way and for its own reasons, the idea of a separate Jewish labor movement. The founders of the Bund in the 1890s, who considered themselves, above all, members of the general Russian socialist camp, had to devise a worldview that stressed concurrently the singularity of the national and class condition of the Jewish worker and the integral inclusion of this worker in the general proletarian camp. The decision to depict the Jews as a distinct national bloc within the Eastern European working class and to demand national cultural autonomy on its behalf surfaced as a basic plank in the Bund platform as early as 1905. This idea was based on the premise that several domains – culture, public education, and internal law – should be removed from the competence of the state and entrusted to the democratic, elected institutions of the respective national minorities in Russia, including the Jews. This national cultural autonomism, by its very 197

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nature, was predicated on the national vernacular. The vernacular of the Jewish nation was Yiddish.1 The historiography concerning the development of the Bund’s national perception reveals three principal approaches that explain this development. The first considers it the result of an instinctive, rooted sense of nationhood among members of the Eastern European Jewish proletariat. The leaders of the Bund, most of whom espoused internationalistic attitudes, could not disregard the need to respond to the national passions of their party’s supporters. The second approach regards the development of the Bund’s national perception as a necessity that actually emerged among members of the leadership, the political elite. This elite had to respond to the pressure applied by socialist parties, foremost the RSDRP, and to the challenge of Zionist nationalism. In the third approach, the development of ethnic and class consciousness among Jewish workers in Eastern Europe is considered a product of the struggle for work in the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth century. According to those who favor this approach, which is based on neo-Marxist theories, this is why the Bund developed a national ideology.2 John Mill [Yoysef Shloyme Mil], a pioneer in the Bund and one of the builders of its national ideology, stated in his memoirs that the party leadership was prompted to deal in this matter almost obsessively by the ethno-geographical realities amidst which the Bund came into being. Almost all socialist movements in Eastern Europe developed in a national direction. The PPS was Polish-national, its standard proclaiming the goal of restoring Polish independence. The Lithuanian Socialist Party was vehemently pro-Russian and anti-Polish in its ethnic complexion. In Ukraine, too, the first indications of a nationally oriented socialism became visible in the late nineteenth century. In the Jewish scene, the development of labor Zionism as a grassroots democratic movement presented the Bund with a challenge of a different type. Thus, the main factor to seek in the national ideology of the Bund is the need to lend the Jewish labor movement a distinct identity, externally – vis-à-vis its rivals for the support of the Jewish proletariat – and internally.3 The question of national minorities’ rights in Poland, including the status of Polish Jewry, was not central in the Bund’s attitude toward current problems at the beginning of the First World War. It should be borne in mind that the Polish Bund and the Russian Bund parted ways in the midst of war, separated by mutually inaccessible occupation zones, the events of the 1917 Revolution in Russia, and the fact

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that the party could operate more freely in Congress Poland – the German-occupied areas – than in the areas under Russian rule.4 According to the veteran Bund historian J. S. Hertz, the attitude of the Polish Bund toward the national issue at the beginning of the war was based on Vladimir Medem’s ‘neutralism’ doctrine. In this theory, the Jewish labor movement neither encourages nor resists the assimilation of Jews. The Jewish labor movement should not interfere with Jews’ wish to develop a culture of their own, but it opposes the creation of a national culture that serves the interests of the proponents of those who espouse a Jewish national policy.5 Although some Bundists expressed doubt about the necessity of establishing a Polish nation-state and the sincerity of its intentions to safeguard the rights of its minorities,6 it would not be accurate to portray the stance of the Bund on Polish independence during those years as categorical rejection. Therefore, the dispute with the PPS in 1918–20 seems not to have concerned the question of ‘national Poland’; in the main, it pertained to the wish of the Bund leaders in Poland – foremost Medem – to make sure the Polish state would grant the Jews the status of a national minority with assured entitlements in the field of cultural autonomy. The national question also arose from a different perspective: as a response to the wave of anti-Semitism and pogroms that swept Poland during its first two years of independence. In November 1918, Polish soldiers who had occupied Lemberg killed more than seventy Jews in a pogrom there, burning synagogues, destroying Jewish property, and leaving hundreds of Jewish families homeless. In April 1919, during the Polish–Russian War, thirty-five Jews whom the Polish army accused of supporting the Communists were murdered. These were but the most extreme cases in a countrywide spate of attacks and violence against Jews.7 The PPS condemned the violence without hesitation. It seems, however, that the Polish socialists did not wish to make the treatment of Jews into a major issue amidst the thicket of problems that beset the Polish state in its formative years.8 The Bund strenuously criticized the Polish socialists’ hesitancy on this account, claiming that it stemmed from their reluctance to come to grips with the need to combine the struggle against anti-Semitism with a principled stance in favor of the right of the Jewish proletariat to organize separately, foster its culture, and use its language.9 Notwithstanding its decisions in the early 1920s to distinguish itself from the other Jewish political organizations, the Bund had to create theoretical distinctions that would explain the difference between

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the national autonomy that it favored and the autonomistic frameworks advocated by other Jewish parties and entities. In other words, the Bund had to explain what distinguished its national perspective from that of the Zionist movement beyond the vision of Eretz Israel, which meant little to the Jewish masses in Poland in current existential terms. What was singular about Bund nationalism and the separate organizations that the movement had established for the Jewish public? The early 1920s were years of discord, internal disputes, and external confrontations between the Bund in Poland and players in the pro-Comintern camp. The Bund weathered fierce attacks by supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution on the one hand and exponents of socialist Zionism on the other hand. The party in Poland was in real danger of schism and disintegration in 1919–22. In retrospect, one may say that the ideological disputes with its rivals in the Jewish political world and the European socialist camp actually gave the Bund’s special worldview greater focus and prompted the party to devise a Weltanschauung that steadily gained importance in the Jewish political constellation in interwar Poland. Bundism became a political course of action that attempted to solve the Jews’ daunting existential problems its own way. Pil´sudski’s ‘May Coup’ in 1926 marks the occasion on which the Bund set out on its new political path. The events surrounding the coup inspired great hopes among the party activists. The accession of Pil´sudski, a symbol of the old Polish labor movement, encouraged Jews to hope for the emergence of a more just social regime and, above all, the eradication of anti-Semitism and of the political activity of antiSemitic players in the Polish Sejm.10 Pil´sudski had been the embodiment of the old Polish socialism, of the struggle for freedom and social justice since the beginning of the century. Under his leadership, however, Poland turned into an autarchy that avoided revolutionary change in domestic economic and social affairs. Nevertheless, he gave the Polish political system a measure of stability after the turbulence and distress of the 1919–26 period. Even the activities of anti-Semitic parties and movements receded. Shortly after the May Coup, the Bundists realized that the new situation in Poland offered no hope for sweeping changes in the condition of the working class. Revolutionary optimism gave way to recognition of the need for hard daily work in the long term.11 The situation of the Jewish worker would be transformed not by a revolution but by years of organizational, educational, and cultural toil. From 1926 on, the Bund placed its various settings of activity for the

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Jewish proletariat – trade unions; organizations for youth, women, and sports; and a Yiddishist education system – on an increasingly solid footing. In those years, too, the Bund gave its national ideology its final touches. It is no wonder that Beynish Mikhalevitsh [Yoysef Izbitski], one of the most important Bund theoreticians in the 1920s, took up this issue after the internal party crisis blew over. In a series of articles published in 1927–8, he differentiated between nationalism based on national materialism, national mysticism, or national utopias, and a nationalism that placed the cultural reality at the forefront. The Jewish nation is neither an economic nor an ethnic organism, he argued; it is a cultural organism that joins with other cultural organisms to comprise the economic and political superstructure, i.e., the state. The national idea of the Bund is not based on the premises that every nation needs a separate state and that every state should be inhabited by one nation. The modern state is an instrument to use in meeting the requisites of social development; the more flexible it is, the better it serves this cause. ‘A state of nations,’ Mikhalevitsh ruled, is the way of the Bund – not a separatist, clerical state, but a large, open state that accommodates diverse nationalities.12

Anti-Semitism: Jews as victims The day Hitler acceded to the chancellorship of Germany – January 31, 1933 – Erlich, leader of the Bund in Poland and editor of the party daily Naye folkstsaytung, published an editorial entitled ‘Hitler – Chancellor of Germany.’ It includes the following remarks: The sword that the September 1930 elections suspended over the heads of the German working class has fallen: Hitler has come to power! . . . Hitler in power places everyone in mortal danger, to the last member of the German working class; Hitler in power places the existence of the proletarian organizations in Germany in terrifying existential danger; Hitler in power evokes horrific visions of the physical extermination of a considerable part of the German working class; Hitler in power means a government of wild men, of a nationalism that metastasizes across borders, of racist anti-Semitism in Germany, of extreme chauvinism in international politics; it elevates enormously the danger of war in the world. . . . A cumbrous black shadow has fallen over the entire international labor movement.13

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For the Bund, the Nazi accession in Germany created a complex ideological challenge. As a socialist party, the Bund was not taken by surprise by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and racism. Since the early 1920s, Bund propaganda had been stressing the unpartable knot in which fascism, ultra-nationalism, and persecution of Jews were bound. However, Nazism represented a different kind of anti-Semitism, not only in its intensity but in its being a fixture and a fundamental in the Nazi worldview. It was wholly dissimilar from anti-Semitism rooted in economic, political, or territorial problems, as Polish anti-Semitism had usually been. The Bund’s response to Nazi anti-Semitism would influence, albeit indirectly, its internal debate concerning the Jews’ unique collective fate as the victims of fascism. Two approaches stood out in the Bund leaders’ attitude toward Nazi anti-Semitism. The first was expressed by Kossovsky [Nokhum Mendl Levinson], a leading Bundist and one of the party’s most prominent intellectuals. Kossovsky had lived in Germany for many years and was well acquainted with the political realities there. He assessed the ascent of Nazism in view of the singular problems that beset Germany after the First World War. He was also the first member of the Bund leadership to notice the uniqueness of the Nazi ideology. In his estimation, violence, nationalism, militarism, and anti-democracy had been important fundamentals in German politics since the end of the First World War, and Nazism was the outgrowth of this political tradition, which was deeply rooted in modern German history. In July 1930, Kossovsky also ruled that the Nazi ideological worldview had created an inseparable fusion of anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, and negation of capitalism. In Kossovsky’s judgment, Nazi anti-Semitism was the ideational framework within which the war both on Marxism and on capitalism was being conducted.14 Erlich disagreed. According to his view, anti-Semitism was only one component of the Nazi menace, and not necessarily the main one. Erlich, a pragmatic leader and a man of action, had formed his assessment of developments in Germany back in 1930 and adhered to it until the Second World War began. His view was based on the belief that only a common front of progressive forces in the socialist camp could stanch the spread of dictatorship in Europe. Such a front had not been established in Germany, Erlich argued, and the longer the intellectual weakness of the German Left persisted, the greater would be the danger to democracy. Hitler was not the cause of this danger, Erlich stressed; he was the result of his opponents’ impotence.15 The Bund’s internecine perplexities in the matter of Nazi anti-Semitism were

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evident in Victor Alter’s response to an incident in January 1932, in which pro-Nazi students assaulted and injured a group of Jewish students at the University of Berlin. Alter stated that Hitler definitely wished to establish a Third Reich by means of bloodshed, the prechosen victims of which were ‘Jews and Marxists, Jews and socialists, Jews and communists, Jews and labor-movement leaders. . . . It is no coincidence that Jews are appended to these three groups. It is symbolic and it says something.’16 Because Hitler wished to reach the working class, the Jews were portrayed as the enemies of this class. ‘Jews are the source of all woes. Not capitalism – the Jews.’ This was the slogan of all the reactionaries in the world. With respect to Nazi racism and anti-Semitism, the Bund leaders found themselves trapped in a rather intricate maze. The views of Alter and other Bund exponents were relatively clear: they identified antiSemitism with various shades of fascism and defined its use as a political tactic to mobilize the support of the masses. Others, however, considered racism an immanent ideological fundamental in Nazism. The Nazis, Kossovsky underscored, wished to transform Germany into a monoracial state in which there would be no room for Jews.17 In other words, Nazi anti-Semitism was not a weapon in the struggle against socialism; instead, it was aimed at the Jews as a nation or a race, as the Nazis defined them. The Bund allowed these two approaches to co-exist, its ideology unable to resolve their internal contradiction. This is another example of a tendency in Bund history: the party’s socialist ideology had to reconcile itself with the national element of its worldview. At the very beginning of the Nazi tenure, various Bundists expressed views that illuminate their leaders’ distress as they observed the blows that German Jewry was absorbing. Party activists – not necessarily leaders or official spokespeople – stated without hesitation that German Jewry was marching toward annihilation and disintegration because the Jews were Nazism’s principal victims.18 Khmurner [Yoysef Leshtshinski], a sociologist and a teacher who took the Jews’ unfolding social attrition and psychological distress closely to heart, stated in May 1933 that the great crisis originated in the anomie, alienation, and loss of stability that the Jews in Hitler’s Germany felt. The crisis, he said, was rooted in the feeling that the home had collapsed, that there was no longer a setting to which one might belong.19 After the Nuremberg Laws were enacted (1935), the Bundists no longer doubted that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies threatened the very survivability of German Jewry. During those years, the Bund united around a view

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that, while recognizing Nazi anti-Semitism as unique and aberrant, continued to regard it as only one component, albeit a central one, in the Nazi worldview. In other words, Nazi anti-Semitism did represent a particular menace to the Jews, but the difference between it and the Nazis’ persecution and oppression of other opponents was a matter of intensity, not of essence. Thus, this anti-Semitism was not a basis on which one might define national differences between its victims (the Jews) and other social groups oppressed by other regimes. This approach was put to the test after the November 1938 pogrom (Kristallnacht), an event that stunned the leaders of the Bund in Poland, especially Erlich. In several articles he published in Naye folkstsaytung between late 1938 and the spring of 1939, Erlich attempted to examine the implications of Kristallnacht and its aftermath for the status of the Jews and to probe the stepwise ascent of Nazi anti-Semitism. Erlich concluded that Hitler had managed to transform anti-Semitism from a social phenomenon that served the political goals of violent and, at times, marginal groups in European society into a problem that the international political system would have to confront. Since 1933, anti-Semitism had become an international question, an issue that preoccupied heads of state and a topic of discussion in important conferences. Hitler had managed to turn the Jewish question into a weighty international problem instead of a mere component of the brutal Nazi racism. The events surrounding the Evian Conference and the Czechoslovakia crisis in 1938–9 strengthened Erlich’s feeling that the Jews faced a menace of existential magnitude and that the issue transcended the specific plight of German Jewry.20 Erlich’s feeling, however, did not coalesce into a new political strategy. The war and the occupation that ensued several months later delivered the grim reality to the thresholds of the homes of Polish Jews. The Bund leadership vigilantly monitored the influence of the antiJewish measures in Germany on the Polish far Right. After Pil´sudski’s death in 1935, and as Poland turned toward political radicalization in the years leading up to the war, Polish anti-Semitism became much more violent and dangerous. No longer did some Polish anti-Semites merely internalize the set of Nazi ideological images and perspectives. As the Bund watched with concern, they adopted Nazi methods – street violence, breaking up conferences of political rivals, and imposing a climate of terror and fear in extra-parliamentary political activity.21 This sharpening of political confrontation in Poland and the influence of the anti-Semitic and anti-socialist propaganda on the Polish ruling camp gave the Bund further proof of the need to unify all Polish political players who, by collaborating, could arrest the downslide that would

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result in fascist rule. The Nazis’ accomplishments in the Saar in 1935 and, much more acridly, in the Spanish Civil War and the Czechoslovakia crisis, provided telling evidence of the inability of Western capitalist democracy to stanch the sophisticated and uncompromising violence of fascism. Only a multinational front of progressive political forces could accomplish this, the Bund believed.22 As the distress of Polish Jewry mounted in the mid-1930s – amidst constant efforts by politicians to pass anti-Jewish legislation, and the spread of street violence and economic boycott – the Bund dealt relentlessly with the Jews’ existential problems. The party had not revised its ideology; it continued to oppose vehemently any manifestation of Jewish national separatism, rejected the Zionist nostrum as a preferred alternative, and regarded any propaganda that favored Jewish emigration to Palestine as fuel on the flames of anti-Semitism . in Poland, which regularly invoked the slogan Zydzi do Palestyna (Jews to Palestine). In practice, however, the national issue became the main item on the Bund agenda and made the party’s transformation into a pronouncedly Jewish-national movement even more evident. In 1935, the Bund in Poland held its Sixth Conference. For the first time in the history of such conferences, political and international problems were marginalized in favor of debates about the national issue. Yoysef Leshtshinski’s keynote address, delivered in the name of the movement leadership, shows that the Bund had reached the final stage in the coalescence of its worldview, including how it saw its place and functions in Jewish society. Leshtshinski ruled out the neutralism approach of Medem, who was virtually a mythological personality in the party heritage, toward the national question. Neutralism, Leshtshinski proclaimed, led to active assimilation. The Bund should be active in all Jewish settings in which it could make its voice heard and project its influence.23 By the mid-1930s, the Bund was no longer a hesitant movement that groped for its niche in Polish Jewish society. Instead, it had advanced to the center of Jewish life in Poland. In March 1936, it stationed itself at the forefront of the struggle against anti-Semitism by declaring a general strike on the seventeenth of that month, following the violent incidents in Przytyk and the anti-Semitic tide that was sweeping the country. In many respects, its role in initiating and organizing the March 17 strike represented the party’s ‘coming of age.’ The call for protest actions – seconded by Jewish political circles (Zionist and Orthodox) that opposed the Bund, and broadly supported by Polish trade unions – transformed the Bund into the bearer of a specifically Jewish political

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mission. Yekutiel Portnoy [Noyakh], a veteran Bundist and a member of the movement leadership in its early years, stated without hesitation that March 17 was indeed a day of Jewish national protest – not in the Zionist sense, but for the purpose of securing for the Jewish people the objectives sought by all oppressed victims of fascism, racism, and capitalism. This made it a struggle on behalf of the Jewish people and, in this sense, a national struggle.24 The more the Bund immersed itself in Jewish life, the more it distanced itself from the traditional ideological imperatives that had guided its actions in its formative years after the First World War. The Bund ideology, from the outset attentive to the realities and living needs of the grassroots Jewish collectivity, became pliable and pragmatic in interwar Poland. The more active the Bund became in Jewish education, Jewish labor organizations, Jewish culture, and the war on anti-Semitism, the more pronounced its Jewish national identity became. In its own way, the Bund provided the complex, bumpy path of Jewish existence in interwar Poland with direction and content. But the realities overwhelmed its ability to propose a real solution; like all other Jewish political movements and organizations, the Bund had only partial solutions to offer.

The Holocaust and its impact – are the Jews a ‘world people’? The Germans’ occupation of Poland, followed by their harshly repressive policies there, forced the Bund – like the other Jewish parties and movements – to tackle a wide spectrum of ideological questions concerning its new situation as a Jewish labor movement in the underground. Even as the party continued to sustain public and educational activities in the Warsaw ghetto and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere, its internal forums continued to elucidate its ideology until the very beginning of the great deportations and the Final Solution. The Bundists were aware even before ghettoization that the Germans did not repress Jews as they repressed Poles. The regulations that prohibited study, limited the right to circulate, and isolated the Jews from their surroundings strengthened the Bundists’ belief that the Germans’ policies were but a façade, behind which a radical plan to remove Polish Jewry from the country was being concocted.25 In September 1940, the Bund’s underground journal Biuletin published remarks by the Governor-General, Hans Frank, concerning the future of the Jews in occupied Poland – shortly after Frank had decided to

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make Cracow virtually Judenfrei. The newspaper drew the following clear conclusion from this event: This deportation [from Cracow] is a first signal: the Jews must leave all of Europe. National Socialism will be embarrassed if it does not exploit Germany’s victories to liberate Europe from the Jewish idlers and parasites. . . . The Nazis’ plan for the Jews in Poland is clear and cynical: to rip them out by the root.26 Ghettoization in Warsaw in November 1940, which left no doubt about the difference between the Germans’ measures toward the Jews and those invoked toward the rest of the population, was viewed through ideological lenses, among other perspectives, in the Bund underground press. In the Bundists’ estimation, the Germans had several goals in concentrating and incarcerating the Jews in ghettos. In addition to its importance as part of a repressive policy that aimed to isolate, economically exploit, and starve the Jews, the ghetto offered a way to sever relations between Jews and their surroundings, drive a wedge between the Jewish and the Polish proletariats, and help fan the flames of Polish anti-Semitism.27 From the practical standpoint, ghettoization dealt the activists in the Bund underground a severe blow by rupturing their few remaining contacts with the underground of the Polish socialists. The Bund activists in the Warsaw ghetto continued to follow events and responded, as best they could, to developments in occupied Poland and among the Polish leadership in London. The Bund underground publications abound with programmatic articles, most exuding an apologetic tone and almost all anachronistic. The members could only apply the tools available to them before the German occupation to analyze and understand their current realities. Bundists, like members of other parties and movements, used past events as yardsticks to measure the future. Each movement adhered to its own standard and principles. Accordingly, the Bund believed that the future augured the creation of a socialist, egalitarian, and tolerant Poland, in which the Jewish working class would participate alongside its Polish counterpart. The Nazi occupation and its persecution of the Jews, in themselves, could not undermine this belief, since the brutal anti-Semitic nature of Nazism was apparent to all many years before the occupation of Poland and the ghettoization of its Jews. The Bund continued to oppose any ethnic definition of Jewish nationhood and of a particular Jewish national interest during the

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occupation and ghetto period. As we know, the Bund and its opponents conducted this dispute as acrimoniously and, at times, as venomously as in the disputes of the 1930s in the Polish Jewish press. But the question of historical importance that faced the Bund was the old one: Jewish national solidarity or international class solidarity? The Bund leaders in the underground continued to believe in the existence of Jewish–Polish proletarian solidarity even though the Nazis, through their policy of ostracizing and discriminating against the Jews, had created an impassable obstacle to its fulfillment. This is shown clearly in an analysis of remarks by Mauricy Orzech, the Bund leader in the Warsaw ghetto, in a meeting of underground leaders of all parties and movements in the ghetto in March 1942 on ways of responding to the extermination policy that the Nazis had introduced. The main reason for the Bund’s dilemma on the national question was the evolution of a Nazi occupation policy that consigned the Jews and the Poles to different fates.28 Thus, yet again, as it had been since the early 1930s, the Bund was forced to formulate its stance on the national question in consideration of the negative component of identity that Zionism accepted as self-evident but which the Bund categorically rejected: anti-Semitism. In 1942, this factor was leading to the utter annihilation of the Jewish people. In 1942–3, two Bund leaders – Abrasha Blum in the Warsaw ghetto and Shmuel Zygielbaum in London – realized the unmistakable significance of the results of this anti-Semitism and knew what conclusions to adduce from it with respect to Jewish national solidarity.29 In the second half of the 1940s, the annihilation of Polish Jewry, developments in the Jewish world, and the new political reality in Poland again forced the Bund to confront the national element in its political platform. Although the movement’s centers in Poland and New York were progressively pulling apart, the responses that both of these centers offered after the end of World War II to the Jewish national question seem to have had much in common. The Holocaust had wrought a revolutionary change in the definition of the Bund and its view of the Jewish people’s needs. It led to the painful realization that, in the new realities, general Jewish cooperation in pursuit of singular Jewish national interests was a necessity. The Bund’s new attitude had two aspects: one in Poland, the other in New York. In Poland, the Bund’s ‘splendid isolation’ of the 1930s had been totally shattered. The party collaborated with Zionists, communists, and others to regenerate what it believed it could regenerate – Jewish cultural existence in the new Poland. Franz Kursky, a veteran Bund

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pundit who lived in New York at that time, indicated in late 1944 in a letter to his colleague, the movement veteran John Mill, that some individuals in the US were advocating the view that Bundists in Poland ought to work with ‘the Zionists and with all Polish Jews,’ while others suggested that they ought to work with ‘the committee of Polish patriots in Lublin.’30 It is a disservice to reality to view the . Bund’s partnership in the CKZ P, and in educational institutions, cultural organizations, and vocational rehabilitation agencies, from a pragmatic perspective only. The Holocaust and the difficulties that beset the efforts to revitalize Jewish life in Poland after 1945 unquestionably heightened the Bund activists’ sense of Jewish national solidarity. The Bundists continued vehemently to oppose any solution involving uncontrolled emigration, the brichah (flight), and the Zionist policy of sending clandestine-immigration ships to the shores of Palestine, putting at risk the Jewish refugees aboard. However, it would be erroneous to judge the Bund’s post-Holocaust national ideology from the Zionist perspective only. The Bund in Poland rejected the Zionist prescription as the only way to solve the Jewish national question after the Holocaust, but it definitely accepted Zionism as one way to fulfill Jewish national identity after the Holocaust.31 In Poland, the Bund took an important step toward redefining Jewish nationhood, its decision based on an understanding of the singular Jewish needs after the Holocaust and the need to form a Jewish political system that would take concerted action to meet them. It provided the historical justification for this step by adopting the belief, at times blind if not naive, that it was the historical duty of the new leadership of Polish Jewry to preserve and revitalize the singular Jewish culture of Eastern Europe as the true historical response to the Nazis’ intent to extirpate it.32 In New York, the Bund activists headed in a different direction. They created a basis for the formation – for the first time since the party was founded in Vilna in 1897 – of a common world framework of Bund organizations and Jewish socialist organizations of similar complexion. The Bund activists in New York waged a fierce dispute – among each other and with the Bund leaders in Poland – concerning the 1947 plan to establish a ‘World Coordinating Committee of Bundist Organizations.’ Yankef Pat, a Jewish Labor Committee activist who fiercely opposed the formation of a World Bund Committee, expressed his view that Bundists were being influenced by the fact that other Jewish organizations and movements were establishing their

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own world conferences. But the Bund was different, Pat noted. The Bund did not have a territorial solution for the Jewish people. The Bund spoke of a people and not of a state. The essence of the Bund lay in the fact that it gave a socialist answer to the Jewish question. . . . The Bund was the Bund by virtue of its Jewish socialism. . . . A world Bund is a dream born in despair. There are no different ‘Bunds’ in the world; hence there can be no world Bund and no world conference of Bund organizations . . .33 The first world conference of Bund organizations, held in Brussels in May 1947, marked the inception of a dual process: a final schism within the party, as the movement in Poland was barred from membership in the World Coordinating Committee of Bundist Organizations, and the transformation of the Bund in the West into a Jewish cultural and ideational framework that recognized the singular shared needs of all Jewish communities worldwide. Salient in Pat’s remarks on the formation of a ‘world Bund’ was criticism of the adoption of the organizational pattern chosen by other Jewish political entities, which after the Holocaust established settings that embraced supporters of the movement ideology in the Diaspora countries of the Free World. The Bund, which even after the Holocaust continued to oppose territorialism as the only answer to the Jewish question, nevertheless completed a complicated ideological progression in its definition of Jewish nationhood. A ‘world Bund’ signified recognition, for the first time in the Bund’s history, of a Jewish national interest shared by all Jewish communities and collectives. The participation of Bund delegates from Palestine and, later, from Israel in the World Committee of Bund Organizations lent this recognition a broad, pan-national significance. Much has been written about the role of the Holocaust in shaping the Jews’ new identity in the post-Holocaust era. This process has been continuing to the present day, its complexion varying in accordance with the times and the nature of Jewish communities in each individual country. The Holocaust evidently had a substantial effect on the Bund, as it did on other Jewish ideational organizations and movements after the Holocaust. The disappearance of the Bund as a political movement from the Jewish scene may help to explain the scanty attention invested in study of these changes to the present day.

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Notes 1. J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 210–57. 2. H. J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA, 1972), pp. 50–2, 139–47; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, op. cit., pp. 211–26; Y. Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (New York, 1989). 3. J. Mill, Pionern un boyer, vol. II (New York, 1949), pp. 82–3. 4. B. K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 41–2; M. Mishkinsky, ‘Bein Ha’Bund Ha’yashan LaBund Ha’polani,’ Gal-Ed, XIII (1993), 122. 5. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Der bund in poyln (in di yorn fun der ershter veltmilkhome),’ Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. III, ed. G. Aronson, S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], E. Nowogrudski [Novogrudski], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, 1966), pp. 287–8. 6. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., p. 73. 7. Y. Gutman, ‘Polish Anti-Semitism between the Wars: An Overview,’ in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Y. Gutman, E. Mendelsohn, J. Reinhartz, and C. Shmeruk (Hanover, 1989), pp. 99–100; Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, op. cit., pp. 74–5; and A. Shohat, ‘Parasht HaPogrom BePinsk, Be5 BeApril 1919,’ Gal-Ed, I (1973), 135–73. 8. J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln 1918–1925,’ Di geshikhte fun bund, vol. IV, ed. S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], J. S. Hertz [I. Sh. Herts], Kh. Sh. Kazdan, and E. Scherer [Sherer] (New York, l972), p. 22. 9. Gl ´os Bundu, 12 (June 13, 1919); Hertz, ‘Der bund in umophengikn poyln,’ op. cit., pp. 44–6. 10. B. Goldstein, 20 yor in varshever ‘bund’ (New York, 1960), pp. 115–16. 11. Z. Barzilai, Tnuat HaBund BePolin Bein Shtei Milkhamot Ha’olam (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 40–1. 12. B. Mikhalevitsh, ‘Unzer natsionale program in likht fun der praktik,’ Unzer tsayt, I, 2 (November 15, 1927), 14–15, and ‘Unzer natsionale program in likht fun praktik,’ I, 4 (December 20, 1927), 7–9. 13. H. E[rlich], ‘Hitler – kantsler fun daytshland,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 32 (January 3, 1933), 3. 14. V. Kossovsky, ‘Di daytshe partyen in val-kamf,’ Naye folkstsaytung, July 22, 25, 1930. 15. H. Erlich, ‘Shvartse khmares,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 164 (July 18, 1930). 16. V. A[lter], ‘Der berliner symbol,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 27 (January 25, 1932). 17. V. Kossovsky, ‘Tsi vet hitler kumn tsu der makht?’ Naye folkstsaytung, 24 (January 22, 1932). 18. Y. Pat, ‘Khmares iber daytshland,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 59 (February 25, 1933), 4. 19. Y. Khmurner, ‘Vos mir trakhtn zikh . . .,’ Naye folkstsaytung, 130 (May 5, 1933), 4. 20. H. E[rlich], ‘Di geshenishn in daytshland,’ Naye folkstsaytung, November 14, 1938, 3; ‘In der finsterer nakht,’ Naye folkstsaytung, November 18, 1938;

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‘Agentn,’ Naye folkstsaytung, May 18, 1939. 21. Sz. Rudnicki, Obóz Narodowo Radykalny, geneza i dzial ´alnos´c´ (Warsaw, 1985), pp. 268–70, 295–330. 22. H. Erlich, ‘A tragishe retenish,’ Naye folkstsaytung, January 17, 1935, 3; ‘Hitler hot geentfert,’ Naye folkstsaytung, January 9, 1937, 3; L.H., ‘Di roydef shloymnikes,’ Naye folkstsaytung, October 1, 1938; V. Alter, ‘Untergeotente felker,’ Naye folkstsaytung, January 31, 1939; H. E[rlich], ‘24 shoe,’ Naye folkstsaytung, March 16, 1939. 23. S. Dubnow-Erlich [Dubnov-erlikh], ‘Yoysef leshtshinski (khmurner), zeyn lebn un shafn,’ in Khmurner-bukh (New York, 1958), pp. 171–2. 24. Der yidisher arbeter klas in yor 1936 (Lodz, 1937), pp. 138–40, 155–9. 25. ‘Biuletin,’ June 1940, in Itonut HaMakhteret Ha’Yehudit BeVarsha, vol. I, ed. Y. Kermish and Y. Biolostocki (Jerusalem, 1979), p. 19; ‘Biuletin,’ August 1940, in Itonut, op. cit., pp. 60–1. 26. ‘Biuletin,’ September 1940, in Itonut, op. cit., p. 77. 27. ‘Yugnt shtime,’ 2 (October 1940), in Itonut, op. cit., p. 154; ‘Yugnt shtime,’ 3 (December 1940), in Itonut, op. cit., p. 223. 28. See D. Blatman, LeMa’an Herutenu veHerutchem: HaBund BePolin, 1939–1949 (Jerusalem, 1996), pp. 119–25, 156–63. 29. See D. Blatman, ‘On a Mission Against All Odds: Samuel Zygelbojm in London (April 1942–May 1943),’ Yad Vashem Studies, XX (1990), 237–71. 30. [F. Kursky] to [J. Mill], September 2, 1944 (Bund Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York: ME 40-80). 31. Folkstsaytung, 12–13 (40–41), June 1, 1948; Y. Luden, Ha’im HaBund Hukhra? (Tel Aviv, 1977). 32. L. Finkelshtayn, ‘Al neharot polyn,’ Dos naye lebn, 14 (August 20, 1945), 3. 33. Y. Pat, ‘A bisl apikursus vegn velt-tsuzamenfor fun bund,’ Unzer tsayt, 12 (1946), 15–6, 18.

16 The Bund after the Holocaust: Between Renewal and Self-Liquidation David Engel

It has become fashionable of late in certain circles to charge Zionist historiography and the Zionist establishment more broadly with deliberate suppression of the Bund’s claim to a place of honor in Jewish historical consciousness.1 The validity of such a charge can be reliably investigated, of course, only by a documentary exploration that has yet to be undertaken. Meanwhile, the accusers have tended to support their argument with a teleological inference: knowledge among Jews today of the history of the Bund, or even awareness that such an organization ever existed, is infinitesimal compared with knowledge and awareness of Zionist activities; this situation serves Zionist purposes by eliminating what had once been a powerful ideological competitor; therefore the latter must be the reason for the former. This reasoning is quite obviously specious, but it does pose an important question. If the Bund indeed commands far less of a presence in the consciousness of contemporary Jews than do the Zionist movement and its creations – a proposition that even the most tenacious advocate for the Bund would find it difficult to dispute – how did this situation come to pass? If Zionists did not vanquish the Bund in memory as they did in history, who did? In his recent book on the activities of the Polish Bund during the Holocaust and after, Daniel Blatman has suggested one possible answer: the Bund vanquished itself. In Blatman’s words, ‘the Bund has been relegated to the margins of Jewish recollections of the Holocaust mainly because even its survivors failed to find a way to integrate it into the new [post-Holocaust] chapter in Jewish history.’ A principal manifestation of that failure, according to Blatman, was the Bund’s unwillingness to proclaim, however reservedly, the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish life until it was too late; as 213

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he put it, the Bundists’ ‘long resistance to the historical turning point of 1948 was no small factor’ in their decline. Although, according to his argument, the Bund did eventually modify its position in this regard, conceding the dominant role of the Jewish state on the Jewish public scene while preaching ‘the idea of the bipolar center, Israel and the Diaspora, as the two legitimate focal points of postwar Jewish life,’ it did so only with great hesitation: hence, even though ‘the idea of Diaspora Jewish life that stresses the maintenance of certain [particularistic Jewish] cultural indicators, an idea that underlies the Bundist doctrine, has persisted to this day,’ the memory of the Bund’s existence and activity does not strike those who maintain this idea as especially pertinent to their contemporary ideological battles.2 In support of this reading of the situation Blatman quoted a statement made on the occasion of the Bund’s 80th anniversary by a Yiddishlanguage journalist in Israel to the effect that ‘the establishment of the State of Israel . . . was not able to shake the Bundists’ belief in the principles of their world view; rather it compelled them to swim against the nationalist current in Jewish society.’3 Swimming against any strong current is a tiring endeavor, so one must suppose that the ideological stubbornness that ostensibly drove the post-war Bundists to it wore them out at last, to the point where they were incapable of assuming their position at the head of the camp that would affirm Jewish national life in the diaspora. Blatman’s book, of course, was not about the Bund’s place in contemporary Jewish historical consciousness; his comments in this regard merely framed his detailed examination of the Bund’s history in Poland during the 1940s. Nor did he present the only possible explanation, other than Zionist conspiracy, for the Bund’s relegation to the periphery of Jewish memory: it might just as well be the case, for example, that the exigencies of the Cold War, which impelled American Jews to represent the significant socialist and anarchist elements of their recent past as minor misguided deviations from a larger progressive, Rooseveltian, ‘Judeo-Christian’ liberal tradition, rendered the Marxist Bund not only irrelevant but dangerous to the world’s largest Jewish community, turning it into an embarrassment best kept in the closet.4 Nonetheless, Blatman’s suggestion merits serious consideration, not least because his discussion has yielded two propositions through which the disappearance of the Bund from Jewish historical consciousness can be examined systematically: first, that deliberate decisions by the post-war Bund leadership consigned the organization to irrelevance in the Jewish

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world following the establishment of the State of Israel; secondly, that those decisions were motivated in the first instance by an excess of ideological commitment. What follows represents a preliminary and strictly limited attempt to put those propositions to the test. The limits are geographical and chronological; they confine the examination exclusively to Bund leaders active in Poland during the years 1944–7, a period when the character of the post-war Polish regime, the Polish Left, and the Polish Jewish community was in considerable flux and when the meaning of Jewish nationalism and the relationship between diaspora Jewry and the Jews of Palestine was being passionately debated by Polish Jews of all ideological streams. About those leaders during that interval three questions will be asked: What decisions did they take regarding the manner in which the Bund would renew its activity following the Holocaust? What effect did those decisions have on the Bund’s significance within the community of Holocaust survivors in Poland? What was the thinking that underlay those decisions? The first decisions that fall within these limits were taken (or, perhaps more accurately, not taken) by Szlomo Herszenhorn [Shloyme Hershenhorn], a Polish army medical corpsman and local Bund activist from Lublin who, on August 8, 1944, assumed direction of the newly-created Bureau for Matters Concerning Aid to the Jewish Population of Poland (Referat dla spraw pomocy ludnos´ci z.ydowskiej w Polsce), an office of the Department of Labor, Social Welfare and Health of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego – PKWN).5 In this capacity Herszenhorn was charged with distributing relief funds and supplies to Jews in the Polish territories from which the German occupiers had already been expelled, and with organizing local Jewish communal representations. This appointment placed Herszenhorn, a Bundist, in a seemingly commanding position of influence in the nascent community of Jewish Holocaust survivors at the very moment of its formation – a position that in theory ought to have afforded him a significant measure of control over patronage and access by Jews to the centers of political power. It would seem, therefore, that the Bund might have had a leg up, as it were, in the competition for leadership over the survivor community, for which various organizations, parties, and movements had already begun to prepare: Herszenhorn could easily have prompted the appointment of Bundists to crucial posts on local Jewish committees, and the allocation of funds to local rehabilitation projects bearing a Bundist cast.

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However, Herszenhorn does not appear to have done much to use his strategic position to the Bund’s advantage. The scanty evidence that has come to light thus far about the composition of local Jewish representations during the Lublin period has not revealed a significant Bund presence in them, whereas it has shown traces of involvement by Zionists, religious Jews, and most often survivors without any apparent party or ideological affiliation.6 In Lublin itself the organizational initiative appears to have been seized mainly by a group of General Zionists coalescing around the figure of a former Sejm deputy and current PKWN member, Emil Sommerstein, which created a new political movement called Ichud.7 Although a Bund organizing committee, consisting of Herszenhorn, Michal´ Szuldenfrei [Mikhl Shuldenfray], and Gerszon Jaszun ´ ski [Gershon Yashunski], was organized on September 24, 1944,8 its presence does not appear to have been strongly felt in the formation of groups such as the Organization of Jewish Writers, Journalists, and Artists; the Central Jewish Historical Commission; the Jewish Press Agency; the Lublin Jewish Committee; and even the Temporary Central Committee of Polish Jews, all of which began to operate in Lublin between August and November 1944. Not that Bundists were absent from these bodies; Szuldenfrei, who had been a member of the Organizing Committee of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, attached to the Union of Polish Patriots, eventually was named vice-chairman of the Temporary Central Committee, and Jaszun ´ ski became one of the editors of the Jewish Press Agency’s Bulletin. But non-Bundists played much more prominent and decisive roles in all of them.9 Evidently, then, Herszenhorn did not utilize his leverage as head of the governmental agency that, among other things, made recommendations to PKWN regarding funds for Jewish social and cultural activities, to advance his party’s position in the emerging post-war Polish Jewish community. The available evidence does not permit any firm determination of the reasons why Herszenhorn did not act in this fashion. Perhaps he lacked the political experience or the stature to exploit his position to partisan advantage; perhaps he was not permitted to do so by his PKWN superiors, who had their own agenda with regard to the manner in which Jewish communal life would be re-established.10 But it may also be that he did not view publicly-funded social-service and cultural organizations as the proper forum for conducting intracommunal partisan political battles. What does seem clear is that over the next few years the leaders of the Bund in Poland consistently refrained from using those organizations as vehicles for staking out

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their niche on the Jewish street, and their ongoing reluctance to do so appears to have placed them at a decided disadvantage in the struggle for post-war Jewish leadership. This divorce of the political from the socio-cultural realm was to vitiate the Bund’s ability to reassert a presence among post-war Polish Jews because the structures in which Polish Jewish politics could be conducted after 1945 did not support such a separation. Before the war Jewish politics in Poland centered largely on electoral campaigns – whether to the Sejm, the municipal councils, or the local Jewish community boards – in which a wide range of ideologicallydefined parties appealed for support, mainly on the basis of their respective broad visions of the Jewish future.11 To be sure, Jewish voters evidently did not always cast their votes on an ideological basis, as their penchant for ticket splitting according to the type of election and the immediate issues being contested indicates; rather they appear often to have rewarded the parties that offered what seemed the most effective responses to their short-term problems of economic and physical security, no matter what their general ideological orientation.12 Indeed, the Bund appears to have benefited notably from this situation during the late 1930s, when many Jews (who had little use for its working-class-based diaspora nationalist ideology) supported the party because of its leading role in the Jewish trade unions and self-defense organizations.13 Perhaps, had the war not intervened, the Jewish parties would have recognized the increasingly non-ideological nature of the Jewish vote and adjusted their electoral strategies accordingly; but the German and Soviet occupations severed the continuity of Polish Jewish political life, and the post-war Jewish political arena was radically different from its pre-war counterpart. In the first place, its scope was limited to the network of local, district, provincial, and countrywide Jewish committees that had been organized, largely as a result of government initiative, during the first half of 1945. Jewish political parties no longer had the task of representing Jewish interests in local and countrywide legislatures; instead, that function was now vested in the Jewish committees themselves. On a day-to-day basis, however, those committees carried out tasks that were more social and cultural than political in nature – operating temporary shelters, orphanages, employment services, and health clinics; making loans to the indigent; conducting Jewish literary and musical evenings; publishing books and newspapers; opening libraries and reading rooms; assisting in the tracing of relatives. And most important, the composition of the committees

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was determined not in open public elections but in behind-the-scenes inter-party negotiations whose outcome was not required to reflect the actual division of party loyalties on the Jewish street.14 This new political model implied the obscuring of boundaries between what had formerly been separate political and socio-cultural spheres. It meant that a party’s visible presence in the management of social and cultural institutions operated by the Jewish committees, instead of representing the spoils of the prior acquisition of political support among the Jewish public, was now a prerequisite for acquiring that support; the social and cultural institutions represented the most effective vehicle through which parties could make contact with potential adherents and deliver their messages to them. In this situation, Jews were more likely to form their impressions of those who sought to lead them on the basis of their effectiveness as suppliers of vital social services than of their abilities as debaters or the resonance of their ideological messages. Thus it did not pay for groups aspiring to lead the post-war Polish Jewish community to invest the better part of their energies and resources in activities appropriate to electoral competition, such as formulating and publishing ideological platforms, or distributing broadsheets, or holding rallies. It made much more sense for such groups to work on mobilizing their active members to staff the shelters, orphanages, libraries, and loan banks through which communication between Jews and their would-be leaders was most immediate and sustained. Some of the Jewish parties and movements that reconstituted themselves in post-war Poland appear to have grasped this basic fact of political life in the survivor community better than others. The various groups that coalesced under the labor Zionist banner decided as early as March 1945, in the face of an instinctive, ideologically-based resistance to the very thought of reconstructing a Jewish community in Poland after the Holocaust, to play an active role in the reconstruction efforts of the Central Committee of the Jews in Poland (Centralny . . Komitet Zydów Polskich – CKZP) and its local agencies and to establish additional institutions of their own, beyond the Central Committee’s purview, dedicated to providing food, shelter, employment, education, and fellowship to Jews in need, whatever their ideological bent.15 The reason for adopting this strategy, explained one of the leaders of the labor Zionist youth movement Dror, was that ‘we see no other possibility except to adapt ourselves to this system [of communal organization under the aegis of the Jewish committees] if we are to realize our aspirations [as a movement] and . . . conduct practical work [towards that

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end].’16 Indeed, this decision was to prove crucial in enabling the labor Zionist youth movements to lead some 120 000 Jews out of Poland between July 1945 and February 1947.17 Similarly, communists interested in joining the battle for hegemony in the Jewish street appear to have resolved to fight that battle mainly through the Jewish social-welfare apparatus. In April 1945 the Central Committee of the PPR issued an instruction to all of its local and district branches indicating that whereas ‘most Jews returning [to Poland] are congregating around the Jewish committees and receiving material and emotional assistance through them,’ and whereas ‘various Jewish political factions are forming within the Jewish committees, where the direct influence of our party is essential . . . all Jews who are members of the Polish Workers’ Party must establish party caucuses in all local Jewish committees.’ Through these caucuses they were instructed to ‘demonstrate maximum activity towards guaranteeing equitable distribution of material assistance . . . directing Jews to [jobs in] factories, offices, etc.; caring for Jewish children living in orphanages and with Polish families; [and] developing a wide network of cooperatives for Jews in all lines of work.’18 Party members, in other words, were told to become involved in Jewish politics at the grassroots level of providing essential services, not on the level of ideological confrontation; their mission was less to persuade Jews of the theoretical superiority of Marxism–Leninism as a political doctrine than to show them that communists could do the best job of feeding them, housing them, protecting them, and finding them jobs. In contrast to these groups, the Bund appears to have preferred to carry on its campaign for leadership of post-war Polish Jewry mainly on the ideological plane. The party’s first organizing conference, held at Lublin in November 1944 (in which probably not many besides Herszenhorn, Szuldenfrei, Jaszun ´ ski, and Leo Finkelstein [Finkelshtayn] took part), adopted a lengthy five-point resolution explaining why it was important to rebuild the Bund even after the masses of Jewish workers who had formed its historic constituency were no more. Its fundamental message was that ‘all of the social, political, and ideological conditions for the existence of the Bund remain in force.’ In particular, it declared, capitalism had not yet been defeated, even in Poland and even within Jewish society, so that ‘even within Jewish society the necessary conditions for carrying on the class struggle will continue to exist.’ Hence, the resolution concluded, ‘raising consciousness about the necessity of continuing the class struggle is the fundamental problem of the reawakening Jewish workers movement’; and on that basis it called upon ‘all Jewish workers

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and the Jewish socialist intelligentsia to close ranks behind the Bund.’19 On the other hand, the resolution contained no indication of how the Bund proposed to provide immediate day-to-day sustenance and security for the growing community of Holocaust survivors – a community in which class divisions had long been obviated and for whom potential class conflict paled in significance beside the murderous ethnic strife that was, as the resolution itself noted in another paragraph, driving Jews towards greater national identification. The Bund, according to the resolution, needed to fight the nationalist advance on the Jewish street, but the document gave no indication that the party was prepared to fight it by any means except words and slogans. This strategy appears to have remained in force after the whole of Poland had been liberated, when small circles of pre-war Bund activists re-established party cells in Lodz, Warsaw, Czestochowa, Piotrków, ‘ Cracow, and Tarnów. On April 20, 1945, in preparation for upcoming May Day celebrations, the newly-constituted Bund Central Committee issued what seems to have been its first public appeal, a two-columned broadsheet in Yiddish headed with the familiar battle cry ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ This document was replete with stock phrases about how ‘the international solidarity of the working class and the united workers’ front constitute the sole practical barrier against imperialistic wars and international reaction,’ but it had not a word to say about the immediate existential difficulties Polish Jews were facing in rebuilding their lives. On the issue of physical safety for Jews, the appeal noted only that ‘we condemn anti-Semitism as a reactionary movement, and we see that the Polish democratic forces are combating all of its manifestations with mounting energy,’ suggesting that the Bund found the government’s protection of Jews adequate and was prepared to leave security matters entirely to its discretion.20 It was not until two months later, at the party’s first post-war countrywide convention on June 16–17, 1945, that the Bund officially took notice of the work of the Jewish committees, stating that it regarded the committees’ activities positively and calling upon all Bund members ‘to collaborate with [them] intensively,’ especially in their efforts at ‘productivization of the Jewish population.’ But these modest declarations were buried within a mass of ideological verbiage about the ever-widening gap between capitalists and workers and the liberating role that the Soviet Union not only played during the war but was bound to continue playing as the dark forces of reaction tried to stave off the inevitable socialist triumph. To the growing number of Jews who had by that time come to despair of the possibility of ever

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living safely in Poland the convention offered nothing more concrete than ‘the ideology of proletarian struggle in the homeland, in solidarity with the Polish workers’ movement, for the victory of democracy and the welfare of the entire working class through the incorporation of the Jewish population in the process of productive labor.’21 How that ideology was to be expressed in practice the convention was evidently not prepared to say. Such phrases could also be found, it is true, in documents produced by the Bund’s closest ideological competitors, the Jewish communists, in their interactions with the broad body of Holocaust survivors. However, the communists generally did not stop with ideological rhetoric; unlike the Bund, they were prepared more often than not to say precisely how they intended to translate that rhetoric into reality. Compare, for example, the Bund’s June 1945 resolution about the Jewish committees with a parallel statement adopted at the first countrywide convention of Jewish PPR activists in October 1945: instead of a brief general affirmation of support for the Jewish committees, the communists’ resolution pledged the party to work through the committees to establish new cooperatives, resettle Jews in the western territories, create vocational training programs for youth, and found cultural clubs for workers.22 In other words, although Jews might hear from both the Bund and the Jewish communists that Polish Jewry’s future was intimately bound up with the international struggle of the proletariat, the Bund did not explain why it, and not the communists, deserved to lead Polish Jewry in that struggle. The communists made a far more convincing case in this regard. To be sure, the picture of a Bund steadfastly refusing to descend from its ideological cloud that emerges from the Bund Central Committee’s own publications and propaganda materials does not appear nearly so stark when the activities of Bund members on the local level are examined. In Czestochowa, for example, the local party headquarters on ul. ‘ Katedralna served as a public kitchen, library, and meeting place for over 100 Jews on a daily basis, more than twice the number enrolled in the town’s party cell. Lieber Brenner [Liber Brener], the local Bund leader, served as chairman of the district Jewish committee, and a Bund member directed the local Jewish children’s home.23 In Przemys´l a group of Bundists opened an orphanage on their own.24 But these events took place in relatively small, provincial communities, not in the emerging centers in which post-war Polish Jewry was to become concentrated. Moreover, the Bund does not appear to have sustained these operations on its own for long: responsibility for the Przemys´l orphanage passed

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quickly to the local Jewish committee, while the Czestochowa Bund soon ‘ found itself sharing its headquarters with the town’s Jewish PPR faction for weekly Yiddish cultural events.25 On the whole, it appears more probable than not that the involvement of Bundists from these two towns – as Bundists – in non-ideological social and cultural activities was atypical, although sustained research into the post-war Bund’s local history may well bring to light additional examples of such behavior.26 In any case, it is clear that such local examples were not immediately reflected in the manner in which the Bund conducted its affairs on the countrywide level. In fact, in February 1946 the Bund Central Committee made a decision that testified starkly to the party’s continued tendency to approach the problems of post-war Polish Jewish life from a perspective that was far more ideological than practical. In that month a delegation of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine made a five-day factfinding trip to Poland in order to learn at first hand of the condition of Polish Jewry and to explore how the British mandatory territory might play a role in its . amelioration. The CKZ P submitted a memorandum to the AngloAmerican delegates containing three demands: for abrogation of the British White Paper of May 1939; for free Jewish immigration to Palestine; and for ‘recognition of an independent Jewish existence in Palestine.’ The third demand represented a compromise between . Zionist and communist positions on the CKZ P; the Zionists had wanted an explicit call for Jewish statehood while the communists had pressed for mention of the rights of Palestinian Arabs alongside Jews. The compromise had been obtained only after bitter inter-party fighting that had brought the Jewish committee to the brink of dissolution. The Bund, however, objected to it strenuously, insisting that any statement on Palestine also stress the right of Jews to migrate freely to whichever country they wished; it thus refused to associate . itself with the CKZ P’s memorandum or with any of the communitywide protest activities that the committee organized, including a highly successful mass rally and demonstration against the White Paper in Lodz on February 10.27 The contrast between the communists’ willingness to compromise on . a matter of ideological principle for the sake of the CKZP’s integrity and the Bund’s refusal to do the same is instructive. Animating the communists’ stance was both an understanding of the vital importance of a body representing all Polish Jews for obtaining continued relief funds and supplies from Jewish organizations in the West and a realization that most Polish Jews identified emotionally with the struggle of Palestinian Jewry

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for independence. As a delegate to a conference of Jewish PPR activists in August 1945 had explained, it was clear that the Jewish street longed ‘for cooperation among all segments of the nation, for national unity, for national solidarity, for elevating the authority of the Jewish people, and for making the authority of the Jewish people equal to that of all other peoples of the earth’; it was also clear that whoever did not grasp this fact was ‘isolated from Jewish life.’28 Hence, in order to preserve their credibility in the eyes of the people they sought to lead, Jewish communists were prepared to consider modifying hallowed ideological positions; during 1945–6 they engaged in vigorous internal debates over how extensive a modification was necessary and of what sort, but they did not seriously challenge the principle that ideology might be bent in the name of political utility.29 A similar development does not appear to have taken place among the Bund leadership. In conflicts between ideology and expediency, they stood for the former, preferring to be right instead of smart. A likely explanation for this phenomenon is rooted in the Bund leadership’s vision of its party’s future in Poland after the Holocaust. In a survey of Jewish political activity in post-war Poland generally attributed to the communist Szymon Zachariasz [Shimon Zakhariash] in 1946, the Bund was said to have been divided into four factions. Only one of these factions favored the continued existence of the Bund in Poland as a distinct political group. The other three advocated selfliquidation, one through amalgamation to the PPS, one through collaboration with PPR, and one through migration abroad.30 If this analysis is correct, then those who sought absorption into a larger non-Jewish party would naturally have been more concerned with proving their ideological fitness as socialists to their potential absorbers than with demonstrating their practical abilities as communal workers to the Polish Jewish remnant.31 These people evidently believed, as Szuldenfrei, who headed the pro-PPS faction, wrote to Emanuel Szerer [Sherer] and Lucjan [Lutsian] Blit in London in July 1945, that ‘in the face of the annihilation of the Jewish masses by the Germans there is no possibility of [renewing] the former range of activities within the [Jewish] community’; hence, Szuldenfrei observed, the party’s ‘ideological orientation and agreement upon a platform of principles is of fundamental importance.’32 In other words, the Bund’s primary post-war task was defined in terms only peripherally related to the perceived immediate needs and desires of the Jewish street. Hence it seems reasonable to conclude that Blatman’s suggestion about the Bund’s ‘fail[ure] to find a way to integrate it[self] into the

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new [post-Holocaust] chapter in Jewish history’ is indeed applicable to the period 1944–7 in Poland: during this time the Bund leadership does not appear to have been terribly concerned with giving its potential followers what they most desired or with addressing itself to relieving their primary short-term burdens. But the very fact that this phenomenon is so starkly observable during this interval indicates not only that the Bund’s failure in this regard manifested itself even before ‘the historical turning point of 1948’ but that anti-Zionism was only one among several Bundist attitudes that contributed to it. Even the notion that excess ideological zeal within the Bund leadership underlay the decisions that helped isolate the Bund from the post-war Polish Jewish street needs to be qualified. True, the Bund consistently represented itself, on the countrywide level at least, as an ideological movement more than as a party dedicated to the amelioration of the immediate plight of Holocaust survivors; but it did so not only out of blind fervor but also, and perhaps mainly, because many of its leaders despaired of its ability to sustain itself in the latter capacity following the decimation of the Bund’s natural constituency. Those leaders might well have agreed with Blatman’s conclusion that ‘where there is . . . no Jewish proletariat . . . there is no Bund.’33 Were they correct? Did Polish Jewry’s losses in the Holocaust inevitably doom the Bund to future irrelevance no matter what the party’s leaders did? With regard to the community of survivors in Poland before the liquidation of the non-communist Left it is possible only to speculate about the answer, because the Bund really did not try seriously to redefine itself with a mind to challenge such a fate. No doubt that lack of effort tacitly encouraged Polish Jewry to remove the Bund from its common consciousness. But whether it is possible to extrapolate from the situation in Poland between 1944 and 1947 to a general explanation of the Bund’s peripheral place in post-war Jewish public memory depends upon the results of a systematic study of the Bund’s ongoing interaction with the central communities of the postwar Jewish world. Such a study, like one about the Bund’s treatment in Zionist historiography, has yet to be pursued.

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Notes 1. See, for example, I. Zertal, ‘HaMe’unim haKedoshim,’ Zemanim, 48 (1994), 37. 2. D. Blatman, LeMa’an Herutenu veHerutchem: HaBund BePolin, 1939–1949 (Jerusalem, 1996), pp. xix–xx. 3. Ibid., pp. 360–1. 4. Compare, for example, the mid-1950s presentation of the Bund as a victim of Bolshevism and the evocation of ‘Russian Jewry’s “liberal” tradition in America,’ in H. M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York, 1958), pp. 293–302, 323–38. 5. On the establishment of the Jewish Aid Bureau and on Herszenhorn, see D. Engel, ‘The Reconstruction of Jewish Communal Institutions in Postwar Poland: The Origins of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, 1944–1945,’ East European Politics and Societies, X, 1 (Winter 1996), 96. 6. For sources, see ibid., pp. 94–6. 7. On the activities of Ichud in Lublin, see D. Engel, Bein Shihrur liVerihah: Nitsolei haSho’ah bePolin vehaMa’avak al Hanhagatam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1996), pp. 71–2. 8. Szuldenfrei, Herszenhorn, and Jaszu´nski to E. Osóbka-Morawski, September 24, 1944, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN) PKWN I/47, poz. 25. 9. H. Shlomi, ‘Reshit haHitargenut shel Yehudei Polin beShilhei Milhemet haOlam haSheniyah,’ Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland, II (1975), 301–7. 10. On this agenda, see Engel, ‘Reconstruction,’ op. cit., 96–9. 11. A. Manor, ‘HaMiflagot beYahadut Polin bein Shtei Milhamot haOlam,’ . Sefer HaShanah/Yorbukh, 3 (1971) 223078; A. . Hafftka, ‘Zydowskie stronnictwa polityczne w Polsce Odrodzonej,’ in Z ydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, vol. II, ed. I. Schipper, A. Tartakower, and A. Hafftka (Warsaw, n.d.), pp. 249–85. 12. On these features of interwar Polish Jewish political life, see, inter alia, E. Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York, 1993), pp. 65–78. 13. See E. Melzer, Ma’avak Medini beMalkodet: Yehudei Polin, 1935–1939 (Tel Aviv, 1982), pp. 279–88. 14. On the nature of the Jewish committees and the apportionment of members in them, see Engel, Bein Shihrur liVerihah, op. cit., pp. 57–61, 73–4. 15. Ibid., pp. 75–89. 16. Unsigned [Oskar Handler] to ‘Haverim Yekarim,’ n. d. [March–April 1945], Hashomer Hatsair Archive, Givat Haviva, Israel, 32.3(2). 17. Engel, Bein Shihrur liVerihah, op. cit., passim. 18. ‘Okólnik do wszystkich komitetów wojewódzkich i miejskich Polskiej Partii Robotniczej,’ April 1945, Information Centre of the Interuniversity Project for the Study of Illegal Jewish Immigration to Palestine, Tel Aviv University (IC) 35/5. 19. ‘Rezolucja Konferencji “Bundu”,’ Biuletyn ‘Bundu,’ 1 (April 1945), 11–13. 20. The broadsheet is located in the Archives of the Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University (DRI), INV. 153/22. 21. ‘Rezolucje uchwalone na Krajowej Konferencji “Bundu” w Lodzi dnia ´

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16–17/VI 1945 r.,’ Biuletyn ‘Bundu,’ 2 (July 1945), 11–14. 22. Two-page, untitled, handwritten statement containing eight instructions, introduced by the words ‘Narada wzywa wszystkie frakcje PPR pracujace na ‘ . terenie komitetów z yd . . .,’ n.d. [October 9, 1945], IC 35/5. 23. L. Brener, ‘Der yidisher yishuv in tschenstokhov nokh der tsveyter veltmilkhome (1945–1956),’ in Tschenstokhov, ed. S. D. Singer (New York, 1958), pp. 82–3; R. Federmann, ‘Der “bund” in tschenstokhov in di yorn nokh der tsveyter velt-milkhome,’ in ibid., pp. 87–9. 24. Blatman, LeMa’an Herutenu, op. cit., pp. 284–5. 25. H. Datner-Spiewak, ‘Instytucje opieki nad dzieckiem i szkol´y powszechne . Centralnego Komitetu Z ydów Polskich w latach 1945–1946,’ Biuletyn . Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 3 [119] (1981), 39; Federmann, ‘Der “Bund”,’ op. cit., p. 88. 26. An indication of this trend can be found in the survey of local party activities published by the Bund in October 1945: ‘Partay-khronik,’ Biuletin fun ‘bund,’ 3 (October 1945), 21–8. Another can be seen in the .broadsheet prepared by the Bund local committee in Rychbach: ‘Do Zydowskich Robotnikow i Mas Ludowych!,’ n.d., DRI INV. 153/22. 27. For details on this episode, see H. Shlomi, ‘The Communist Caucus in the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, November 1944–February 1947,’ Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland, XIII (1993), 93–4; D. Engel, ‘Palestine in the Mind of the Remnants of Polish Jewry,’ Journal of Israeli History, 16 (1995), 225–6. . 28. ‘Posiedzenia nr. 5 aktywu zydowskiego PPR w dniu 3 sierpnia 1945 r.,’ IC 35/5. 29. See D. Engel, ‘The Holocaust as a Factor in Shaping the Jewish Identity of Communist Jews in Poland, 1945–1946,’ in The Jewish People at the End of World War II (Jerusalem, forthcoming). . 30. ‘Informacja dot. sytuacji Z ydów w Polsce, dzialalnosc´i organizacji i projekt . ´ wytycznych dla naszej polityki na odcinku zydowskim,’ AAN KCPZPR, 2957-149. 31. Of course, if the analysis is not correct, an alternative explanation would have to be found. Such an explanation might perhaps be rooted in the characters of the individuals involved and in the personal relations among them. At present, however, the state of the documentation that has thus far been brought to light does not appear to permit reliable testing of this or any other hypothesis or even of the validity of the analysis attributed to Zachariasz. 32. Szuldenfrei to ‘Moi Drodzy i Kochani Towarzysze,’ July 18, 1945, Jewish Labor Bund Archive, New York, ME 42/5c. 33. Blatman, LeMa’an Herutenu, op. cit., p. xx.

17 Where was there a Future for Polish Jewry? Bundist and Zionist Polemics in Post-World War II Poland* Natalia Aleksiun

A demographic and organizational overview Different estimates have been given regarding the number of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. Estimates regarding the total number of Jews who survived in areas under the Nazi occupation range from 50 000 to 120 000.1 On June 5, 1945, the Central Committee of . . the Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Zydów Polskich, CKZ P) registered over 70 000 Jews in liberated Polish territory.2 As a result of a Polish–Soviet agreement on repatriation concerning Polish citizens, including those of Jewish nationality, in July 1945, approximately 136 000 Jews returned to Poland in 1946.3 By the end of this wave of . repatriation in mid-1946, the CKZP claimed that there were over 240 000 Jews in Poland. However, at this time the real number of Jews in Poland was considerably lower as a result of the phenomenon of mass Jewish emigration.4 Thus, according to data collected by the local Jewish committees in the spring of 1947, slightly over 90 000 Jews remained in Poland.5 In the second half of 1947, and 1948, the Jewish population stabilized as emigration continued on a more limited scale. In March 1949, the last census of the Jewish population in Poland indicated that there were at least 95 000 Jews in the country. However, only a few months later there was another mass Jewish emigration and more than 30 000 Jews left Poland. The majority of those Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, both in Poland and in the Soviet Union, were men. A much smaller percentage of the survivors were children or older people.6 Most of these people were the lone surviving members of entire families or communities. Both 227

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government reports and the information provided by Jewish institutions emphasized the extremely grave material and psychological condition of these survivors.7 The survivors, especially those repatriated from the Soviet Union, often found themselves in an unbearable situation as they were faced with the scale of the Holocaust for the first time. Despite these hardships, the survivors were very active and soon established a complex network of communal and political organizations. For the most part they received support from the new government dominated by the Communists, which allowed various Jewish political parties and organizations to operate freely. Almost all of the pre-war Jewish parties and youth organizations were reconstructed and legally recognized by the Polish government.8 These groups included left-wing parties and organizations like the Bund and Tsukunft; left-wing Zionist organizations such as Poalei Zion-Left, Borokhov Yugnt, and Hashomer Hatzair; and mainstream Zionist groups like Poalei Zion-Right and Dror, as well as Ichud and Hitachdut. The religious Zionist party Mizrachi was also rebuilt. Of the major pre-war Jewish political parties, only the Revisionists and the orthodox political party Agudas Yisroel were not legally recognized. The first post-war Zionist groups in Poland started to emerge in liberated Rovne and Vilna and later on in Lublin in the second half of 1944. In the same period, the Bund also renewed its political activities.9 None of the parties or the youth organizations mentioned above, it should be noted, should be considered as mass-membership groups.

Jewish political debate in post-war Poland Throughout the immediate post-war period, the Bund and the different Zionist parties remained in an open, ideological conflict. At its core, this conflict was rooted in the contradiction between the Bund’s continued support for diaspora national rights and the Zionists’ call for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. While the nature and future shape of the Jewish communities in both Poland and Palestine were also important factors contributing to this divide, they remained secondary to the ideological differences. Soon after their establishment, the different communal institutions, . such as the nation-wide CKZP and local committees, quickly became public forums for debates between representatives of the different groups.10 After decades of courting Jewish communities with a call for a ‘synthetic Zionism’ – a policy which combined educational and cultural

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activities in the diaspora with the hope for settlement in Palestine – Zionist leaders were now convinced that there remained no viable Jewish future in Poland. On the other hand, Bund leaders often countered that the Zionists were not only indifferent to the Jewish community’s needs, but mercenary in their manipulation of the refugees’ desperate mental and physical conditions. The Bundists and the Zionists continually clashed over the critical issues which dominated debates throughout the Jewish world. The question of Jewish emigration from Poland, the fate of Jewish children, the character of Jewish institutions in Poland, and the Jewish community’s official position towards the Yishuv (the Jewish population in Palestine), all served as foci for the growing rift between the two competing and increasingly hostile camps. Before examining their conflict over specific issues, it is important to appreciate the ideological background dividing these two parties. In the eyes of many Zionist leaders, the Bund embodied the humiliation and defeat associated with the diaspora and, more specifically, the war years. In his memoir A Surplus of Memory, the Zionist leader Yitzchak Zuckerman noted: the official position of the Bund was the sharpest and the silliest position opposed to Zionism. Their words and acts were not only against Zionism, but also against themselves. It was self-destruction, but they didn’t understand it . . . they didn’t understand there wouldn’t be room for the Bund in Poland. Their whole war against Zionism, against our people, was anachronistic; and the same goes for their opposition to the exodus of the Jews.11 . As was mentioned above, the CKZP and local Jewish communities throughout the country often served as public forums for the Bund’s . attacks against the Zionists. Bund representatives to the CKZP – such as Ignacy Falk, Shloyme Hershenhorn, Salo Fishgrund, Mikhael Shuldenfray and others – repeatedly rallied around the theme of Jewish unity.12 They accused the Zionists of forcing the Central Committee to accept a platform that was too extreme. As one Bund representative . declared, ‘The CKZP was created for all Polish Jews in the wake of a disaster. Our mandate was to save . . . the remaining Jews of Poland. This aim unites all of those present and allows the Bund to cooperate with those [Zionists] against whom it has been in an ideological struggle for the last 50 years.’13 According to this line, the Bund leaders strove to use . the CKZP as a vehicle for reconstructing the Jewish community, while the Zionists misused it as an instrument to achieve their narrow,

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politically motivated goals.14 Zuckerman’s own memoirs would seem to validate this position. ‘I wanted to be on the Jewish Central Committee in order to have a place and an office and free transportation, and so I could appear in cities and towns under the aegis of a bureaucrat. . . . We used our seats on the Jewish Central Committee for the Hechalutz movement and for Zionism.’15 This open struggle over the direction of the Jewish communal institutions did not cease at the national level. Throughout the country, debates over the character of local committees regularly took on ideological tones.16 However, the attitude of the different Zionist parties regarding the Jewish community’s future in Poland varied greatly. During a crucial meeting of Zionist leaders in Lublin at the beginning of 1945, representatives of the so-called ‘Asiats’ and Abba Kovner’s group clashed with Jewish leaders from Warsaw over the issue of emigration.17 Zuckerman argued that it would be irresponsible to leave the remaining Jewish community without any seasoned Zionist leaders. He maintained that a cadre of leaders was necessary for the organization and implementation of an all-encompassing evacuation of Polish Jewry. While there was no way to actually reconstruct Jewish life in Poland, a temporary, professional presence was necessary to help organize the emigration of the newly repatriated Jews.18 Throughout the Zionist press, the different political organizations repeatedly declared that in principle they were not opposed to the reconstruction of Jewish life in Poland. Indeed, the Zionists always understood that some Jews would remain. In this manner the Zionists attempted to pre-empt Bundist and Communist charges that they were bent upon evacuating all Jews from Poland. Adhering to the policy of Gegenwartsarbeit (synthetic Zionism), the Zionists supported the creation and implementation of Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education and culture via Hebrew schools and other institutions. The Zionists also called for the continued re-training and productivization of the surviving Jews.19 However, this policy was designed not only to counter left-wing rhetoric but also to help prepare future emigrants for the prospect of physical labor in Eretz Israel. Ultimately, this early support for a reconstruction of Jewish life in Poland was reversed in the wake of the Kielce pogrom.20 In direct opposition to the Zionists, the Bund repeatedly envisioned its future and the future of Polish Jewry in Poland. In a Central Committee meeting, Bund leader Salo Fishgrund stated, ‘the party has not changed its stance regarding the Diaspora. Poland is our country. We feel united with the Polish people’s democracy.’21

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The organized emigration of Jews to Palestine remained the central dispute between the Bund and the Zionist organizations. From an early stage the Bund rigorously opposed the Zionist policy of emigration. Shuldenfray, a Bund representative to the National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN), responded to Zionist leader Emil Sommerstein’s comments on emigration with the following attack: I do not want to lend the impression that the opinions and statements of Mr. Sommerstein are those of the entire Jewish community. Jewish workers, socialist workers, the Jewish intelligentsia and others have only one aim – to return to this country. Together with the Polish working class, we will fight for this country’s development.22 The Jews who arrived in Poland from the Soviet Union between February and July 1946 offered the Bund new hope. In the eyes of many leaders, these Jews would be more likely to remain in Poland, and therefore could help re-create the Jewish community. Exactly because of these hopes, the activities of Zionist organizations amongst these new arrivals led to bitter Bundist attacks. One complaint charged that: ‘Zionist representatives stand in front of the trains and transports bringing repatriates and argue against the idea of remaining in Poland.’ Later in the same discussion, Hershenhorn suggested that ‘this harmful work cannot be stopped without the assistance of the authorities.’23 In conjuction with this argument, the Bund accused the Zionists of deliberately causing a state of panic in order to encourage an exodus of Jews from Poland.24 Fishgrund commented that ‘We must simultaneously defend the lives of our fellow Jews and fight this irresponsible panic and flight from Poland. . . . Our comrades the Zionists will certainly not be offended if I blame them for this panic and the accom. panying emigration.’ Fishgrund demanded that the CKZ P issue a declaration ‘warning against the panic and clarifying that the rumors about the imminent closure of Poland’s borders and random violence against Jews are pure fantasy. Finally, the Central Committee ought emphasize that the Jews should remain in Poland.’25 While some Bund leaders were ready to countenance limited emigration, they accused Zionist leaders of enticing Jews who where previously not affiliated with Zionist groups. Fishgrund declared that ‘the Bund has nothing against an ideologically based emigration. However, organized flight and the transport of Jewish children to displaced persons’ camps, as it is presently being carried out, is nothing short of

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outright kidnapping.’26 Fishgrund called for the creation of a special investigative committee which would review these tactics. He also . demanded that the CKZP condemn the Zionists. Bund representatives demanded that those Polish Jews who remained in the displaced persons’ (DP) camps in Germany be allowed . to return to Poland. Gershon Fogel reminded the CKZ P Executive Committee that it is our obligation to ensure that the democratic government of Poland clearly expresses its readiness to receive those Jews from the DP camps. Towards this goal, the Central Committee ought to both inform those Jews of the real conditions in Poland and emphasize the many difficulties involved in emigrating to Palestine.’27 Ignacy Falk further accused the Zionists: ‘The camps are nothing but a political instrument for the Zionists. They openly admit that the camps are an important tool in their battle against the British.’28 . Officially, the Zionists did not oppose the idea of sending a CKZ P delegation to the DP camps. However, they did stress other duties that such a mission might undertake.29 Throughout the period immediately following the Kielce pogrom of July 1946 the Zionists repeatedly rejected the accusations that they were deliberately causing the panic that engulfed the Jewish world. Shimon Rosenberg of Poalei Zion-Left answered these charges by ridiculing Fishgrund and other Bundists. ‘Fishgrund and his comrades have learned nothing. All their opinions are nothing but malicious, blindhatred.’30 In fact, when the PPR and the Bund initiated a series of emergency meetings throughout the country (there were 24 in Lower Silesia alone), the Zionists took part.31 In many cases, Zionist leaders felt that the panic actually made it more difficult to direct emigration efforts. During an August 1946 meeting in Lower Silesia, a Zionist representative stated that ‘we want to create a Jewish home in Palestine. However, we do not want to deprive Jews of the chance to live peaceful lives in Poland. Furthermore, we remain opposed to mass, illegal emigration.’32 Despite this consensus the Zionists and the Bundists openly clashed in many of these local meetings.33 These clashes show that while the Zionists may have been ready to act against the panic, they were not ready to oppose emigration. The Zionists maintained that the calamities in Poland, especially the Kielce pogrom, influenced the decisions of many Jews who were not yet connected to the Zionist movement, to emigrate.

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Despite the accusaions that they were ‘making political capital off the victims’ blood,’ they repeatedly claimed that the sense of danger was quite real.34

Jewish children and the Jewish future Another major problem which divided the two camps was the fate of Jewish children. From many perspectives, the prospect of reaching a compromise on this issue was impossible.35 The Zionists accused the Bund of neglecting Jewish culture in the different educational institu. tions under the auspices of the CKZP. One of the reports sent to the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency in 1946 clearly summarized these charges. Will these children grow up to be Jews? I doubt it. Or rather I am sure that they will not. They are repeatedly subject to PPR and Bund propaganda. These groups would prefer to bring up these children as good, loyal Poles who know no Yiddish.36 Another dispute was related to the curriculum of the Jewish schools. Fishgrund protested against the obligatory teaching of Hebrew. In response, Mendel Kosover of Ichud, and Zuckerman complained of the insufficient emphasis on Hebrew and Eretz Israel studies.37 The Bund representative, Falk, declared that Yiddish and Jewish education represented the best way to fight assimilation. Furthermore, he proposed that those teachers who did not want to speak Yiddish be dismissed.38 While the Bund advocated that all instruction in the schools be in Yiddish, they were willing to offer several hours of Hebrew lessons a week. Later, the Bund also proposed to ‘transform all the schools, Polish and Hebrew, into Yiddish schools.’39 Since emigration was such a contentious issue for the Bund and the Zionists, the topic of the emigration of children also raised much debate. In particular, their conflict centered around the Bundist charge that Zionists had kidnapped children at the Gostynin transit station and from the Central Committee’s children’s homes. One example which typifies the Bund’s attitude towards these issues was their response to an offer from the Jewish community of Sweden to grant 1000 Jewish orphans refuge. In his vocal opposition to the plan, Fishgrund stated that ‘there is no valid reason to send these children abroad. We do not know what their life will be like there and how they will be raised. Instead we should ask for assistance to help to raise these children in Poland.’ Rosenberg of

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Poalei Zion-Left responded that ‘one shouldn’t take the plight of children in Poland lightly. As long as chaos reigns in Poland we ought to send the children abroad and accept the proposition.’ In the end, Bund representatives abstained from the vote and the measure passed with the support of both the PPR and the Zionists.40 The Bund took a similar position regarding a Jewish Agency proposal to provide 300 visas to Italy and another 200 to France for Jewish children. In the end, the Bund did not even address the fact that these offers would place the children in other countries. Fishgrund took a somewhat extreme stance. ‘We should only consider proposals of philanthropic institutions from neutral countries (Mexico or Uruguay). The Jewish Agency has a political agenda, it is a Zionist organization. How can we give our children to them?’41 . During a CKZ P meeting in June 1946, Fishgrund demanded that those guilty of kidnapping Jewish children in Gostynin be tried. In the end, the Committee found several Zionists guilty.42 Six months later, Shimon Zakhariash, a Communist representative, proposed that the . CKZ P discuss the kidnapping of eight children from the Central Committee’s children’s home in S´wider. Fishgrund seconded the motion and proposed that it be the first issue of the day and also that ‘we ought to notify the Ministry of Internal Security and demand an investigation.’ While Hershenhorn denied knowing who was responsible for the act, he implied that Hashomer Hatzair was probably responsible. On another occasion Fishgrund demanded to know ‘who authorized the different groups to take children? Didn’t Ichud get the children?’43 Hershenhorn complained about the difficult conditions imposed upon children who had been taken from the childrens’ homes and forced to wander to Palestine. In light of these hardships, he demanded that the children remain in Poland until they could be sent directly to Palestine.44

The question of Palestine revisited The Bund repeatedly declared that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine was not the only way to resolve the Jewish community’s many woes. In different venues the Bund tried to block Zionist efforts to support the Yishuv. Hence when Adolf Berman proposed that . the CKZP take action to assist Jewish efforts in Palestine, Fishgrund claimed that while the Bund was prepared to accept a general statement on this issue, it was pointless to file a formal protest against the British, issue a memo, hold a press conference or send a delegation. Instead, he . proposed that the CKZP issue a resolution or send an official protest to

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the British Embassy.45 The Bund reacted similarly in 1947 when the . CKZP proposed to thank the Polish ambassador to the United Nations for Poland’s support of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. When Berman proposed that the text of Gromyko’s speech to the UN be read to all the upper classes in Jewish schools and orphanages, Falk protested. ‘This is an oldfashioned way of relaying information to our youth. Such indoctrination has little to do with facts or education.’46 The Bund maintained this position even after the State of Israel was declared. In response to the formal proclamation of the Jewish state, . the Bund fraction in the CKZ P issued the following statement: Faithful to our Bundist principles – that the existence and future of the Jewish people are directly connected to the victory of socialist ideals in all countries – we think that the Jewish community in Palestine ought to be rooted in human, civil, social and national rights. Firm in our belief that Zionism cannot serve as the solution for our community’s many social and national woes, the Bund fraction in . the CKZP has decided to proclaim the following statement in response to the declaration of a Jewish state in Palestine. . . . Having recognized the impact of our national tragedy the Bund understands the Yishuv’s needs and has declared its willingness to support the Yishuv’s fight for independence. . . . At the same time, it is our right and obligation to stress our concern that the Jewish state be constituted on progressive and democratic principles. Only by coming to an agreement with the Arab working masses in a joint fight against imperialism can the Jewish state overcome its trials and woes. Together, in a united effort against local and foreign chauvinism they can achieve international solidarity, peace and socialism.47 In the summer of 1948, a Bund representative submitted the following statement regarding Israel’s Declaration of Independence. All Jewish parties ought to assist in order to ensure the development and creation of the Jewish state. At the same time, we should stress the historical obligation of our nation to continue building our economic, social, cultural and national lives in the diaspora and to oppose any efforts to undermine such efforts. We must fight against this defeatism and pessimism that threatens our efforts to re-create our national life in Poland. Only via a persistent will to continue, in cooperation and unity with the progressive forces in Poland, may we succeed in preserving the future existence of our nation.48

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The Central Committee as a symbol and an instrument of Jewish identity The Bund also clashed with the Zionists over the proposed character of . the CKZ P. The Bund opposed the participation of the Central Committee in the World Jewish Congress. In the Bund’s opinion, the transformation of the Central Committee into a section of the WJC would only undermine its legitimacy and would make it impossible for it to serve the Jewish community’s best interests.49 Thus the Bund . rejected the CKZ P’s decision to join the WJC. The WJC is an organization whose Zionist character and goals leave little room for doubt. Its activities can be summarized in one sentence: to mobilize all Jews to serve the goals of political Zionism. . . . It is no accident that both in the discussions between . the CKZ P and the WJC and in the formal resolution, central issues like Jewish culture and Yiddish are not even mentioned. This is yet more proof that there is no place for these crucial cultural and national efforts within the framework of the World Jewish Congress. . . . This union is being made without our consent and . against our will. The representatives of the CKZP to the WJC have no right to act on behalf of the entire Jewish community.50 The Bund also opposed the participation of representatives of the . Jewish religious congregations in the CKZ P. This stance was motivated by ‘a deep belief in the necessity of preserving the committees’ secular character and emphasizing the principle that religion is a private affair.’ The Bund repeatedly stated its ‘readiness to oppose any attempts to change the secular nature of the Jewish committees.’51 The Bund’s repeated opposition may have irritated many Zionists, but unlike the actions of Jewish representatives of the Communist Party, it never actually threatened the Zionists’ ability to operate. In fact, in many cases, the Bund’s success was completely dependent upon the support of the Jewish communists. Hence, when these Jewish communists decided not to support the Bund, the latter remained virtually powerless. Despite these conflicts, the Zionist parties did not treat the Bund as a real rival or an actual threat. Isn’t it the time for a change of opinion? This anti-Zionist group has tried many times to revise its opinions regarding the issue of Jews in Palestine and Zionism. . . . Since the War, there has been a

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fundamental change. On one side, this break is the result of the painful lessons of the last War. On the other side, they have learned that they must also take the ideological programs and declarations of the national movements into account. . . .This change, however, is only partial. . . .The socialists’ underestimation of the Zionist socialist groups was a serious mistake. . . .In light of the last UN session, these statements confirm that the Bund has no more ideological basis for its own political position and can only do one thing – hate the Zionists with a deep, anti-Zionist vengeance that pervades everything. Is this hate incurable?52 Among the Bund representatives, there were some who felt that the chances to continue the party’s platform were so limited and the pressure of the Jewish communists so great that they chose, instead, to join the socialist-oriented Zionist groups. In a May 1948 inter-party meeting, Zakhariash accused Bund leaders of permitting situations in which some Bundists felt comfortable joining Hitachdut or Ichud.53 Zuckerman also recalls the participation of many former Bundists in the waves of emigration from Poland and admits that anyone who was willing to emigrate to Palestine was certainly welcome.54

Conclusions Both the Bund and the different Zionist parties had their own designs for Polish Jews in the immediate post-war period. The ideological disputes among these parties became especially visible in the Central and local Jewish committees. The deepest splits were those concerning children and youth, the issue of emigration and the approach to the Yishuv and Israel. These conflicts could not have been settled as they accurately reflected the basic ideological divide between the Bundists and the Zionists. All of these disputes centered around one question: the future of Jewish life in Poland. Obviously, without Jews, and especially without Jewish children and youth, there could be no future for the Bundist dream of reconstructing Jewish life. The Zionists’ activities in Poland were never really imperilled by the Bund’s opposition. However, it is important to stress that ideological conflict does not describe the entire reality. Thus, as these rhetorical battles continued, the two groups were often able to cooperate on different social and communal security projects.

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Notes *

Research for this chapter was carried out thanks to the Skirball Fellowship for East European Scholars at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. I am grateful to Professors Jonathan Frankel, Jacob Goldberg, Jack Jacobs, Marcin Kula, Jerzy Tomaszewski and Feliks Tych for their comments.

1. See, for example, R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1979), p. 670; M. Gilbert, Atlas of the European Jews (London, 1982), p. 242; I. Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. III (New . York, 1990), p. 1174; and T. Prekerowa, Konspiracyjna Rada Pomocy Z ydom w Warszawie 1942–1945 (Warsaw, 1982), p. 323. 2. Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej (MAP), 786, p. 65. Unfortunately the sources at our disposal do not enable us to fully and accurately gauge how many Jews survived the Nazi occupation in Polish lands and how many survived by escaping to the Soviet Union. It is very difficult to give an exact figure for the number of Jews in Poland because of the number of errors which occurred while the survey was carried out. For instance, many of the survivors who moved from place to place in search of family members were registered in more than one location. See also: AAN, MAP, 786, p. 30; ibid., 788, pp. 44–5. 3. The majority of them were directed to settle in Lower Silesia and Szczecin; see AAN, MAP, 788, pp. 113–20, 130. 4. AAN, MAP, 786, p. 67 (Report of the Central Committee of the Jews). 5. Archiwum Urzedu Rady Ministrów (AURM, Office of the Deputy Minister), ‘ 2a/24, p. 22. . 6. See ‘Zarys dzia´l alnos´ ci CKZ P za okres od 1 stycznia do 30 czerwca 1946, Warszawa 1947.’ 7. See M. Szulkin, ‘Sprawozdanie z dzia´l alnos´ ci referatu. dla spraw pomocy ludnos´ci ydowskiej przy Prezydium PKWN,’ Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 3 [79] (July–September 1971), 75–90. 8. For general background information on Jewish political life in Poland, see D. Engel, Bein Shihrur liVerihah: Nitsolei haSho’ah bePolin vehaMa’avak al Hanhagatam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv, 1996); H. Shlomi, ‘Organizing the Survivors of Polish Jewry after World War II’ (Hebrew), in The Broken Chain: Polish Jewry through the Ages, ed. I. Bartal and I. Gutman (Jerusalem, 1997), pp. 523–47. On the political situation in Poland, see A. Polonsky and Boleslaw Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, December 1943–June 1945 (London, 1980); K. Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984). 9. See Y. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Oxford, 1993), pp. 566–75; Y. Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah. The Organized Escape of the Jewish Survivors of Eastern Europe, 1944–1948 (New York, 1970), pp. 3–42. 10. On the Central Committee of the Jews . in Poland, see J. Adelson, ‘W Polsce zwanej ludowa,’ in Najnowsze dzieje Z ydów w Polsce w zarysie do 1950, ed. J. ‘ Tomaszewski (Warsaw, 1993), pp.. 426–8, and 450–72; H. Datner-S´piewak, ‘Szkol y Centralnego Komitetu Z ydów w Polsce w latach 1944–1949,’ ´

Polemics in Post-World War II Poland

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

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. Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 1–3 [169–71] (1994), 103–19; H. Datner-S´piewak, ‘Instytucje opieki nad dzieckiem i szkol´y powszechne . Centralnego Komitetu Z ydów w Polsce w latach 1945–1946,’ Biuletyn . Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 3 [119] (1981), 37–51; D. Engel, ‘The Reconstruction of Jewish Communal Institutions in Postwar Poland: The Origins of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, 1944–1945,’ East European Politics and Societies, X, 1 (Winter 1996), 85–107; H. Shlomi, ‘Pe’ilot Yehudi Polin Lema’an Hidush Haye HaYehudim BaMedinah, Yanuar–Yuni 1945,’ Gal-Ed, XIII (1993), 81–100; H. Shlomi, ‘Activity of Polish Jewry to Renew Jewish Life in the Country,’ Gal-Ed, X (1987), 207–25. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, op. cit., p. 652. . Hershenhorn was one of the two deputies of CKZ P president Emil Sommerstein. He was also a leader of the Child Care Department of the Central Committee. See the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. in . Warsaw (AZ IH), Central Committee of the Jews in Poland (CKZ P), Presidium . .1, Protocol 1, February 2, 1945. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 6, Protocol 35, April 17, 1947. The Central Committee’s appeal to Polish Jews, on February 4, 1945, took a similar stance: ‘This moment – the moment of unity for all remaining Jews on the Polish territory – has given us, the representatives of the progressive movements among the Polish Jews (that is, representatives of PPR, Bund, Poalei Zion Left and Right, Zionist Democrats, Hashomer Hatzair, Hechalutz, the Jewish Fighting Organization, Union of the Jewish Partisans) the incentive to reconstruct the Central Committee on the principle of cooperation between all movements and organizations.’ During the meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee on April 29, 1948, Bund representative S. Fishgrund accused the delegate of the Federation of the Polish Jews in America of supporting the . . Polish Jews in Palestine instead of the Polish Jews in Poland. AZIH, CKZ P, Presidium 10, Protocol 36. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, op. cit., p. 574. In Szczecin, for example, a Bund representative submitted a statement ‘that Zionist representatives should not be responsible for the Cultural Department of the Jewish Committee in Szczecin as, in fact, they are not Polish citizens but Palestinians.’ The local Zionist representatives sharply protested at this statement. Representatives of Poalei Zion went so far as to to state that the Bundists were purposely trying to destroy the inter-party unity that previously reigned in Szczecin. Lavon Institute, Labour Archives, IV-407-1-231 B, Protokó´l Miedzypartyjnej Komisji Porozumiewawczej przy . ‘ WKZ P w Szczeninie, March 18, 1947. Asiats were members of Zionist youth movements, mostly from Hashomer Hatzair and Dror, who were refugees in Central Asia during the war. They set up an efficient illegal body and were involved in educational activities and mutual aid societies. See Bauer, Flight and Rescue, op. cit., pp. 20–2, 26–31. See also Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, op. cit., pp. 579–81. See, for example, M. Pinsker, ‘Produktywizacja przede wszystkim,’ Nasze sl ´owo, 2–3 (May–June 1946), 2: ‘We can notice the beginning of the national and social liberation of the Jewish nation through the concentration of the

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20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 Jewish working masses in Palestine. This, however, does not free us from the duty of an active participation in the process of productivization. On the contrary we are convinced that productivization of the Jewish masses is an urgent need. If we succeed in the transformation of the Jewish masses it will help in the difficult process of re-shaping the social structure of the Jews.’ See also, a general meeting of the Jews living in Zlotoryja (in Lower Silesia) on September 21, 1946, Archiwum Pa´nstwowe we Wrocl´awiu (Archives of the . Province of Wroclaw, [AP Wroclaw], Wojewódzki Komitet Zydowski (The . Jewish Committee of . . the Province, WKZ), 20, pp. 30-30 verte. See also AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 3, Protocol 67, August 14, 1946. On the session of the presidium, Zuckerman made a statement: ‘I have nothing new to say tomorrow on the meeting of the representatives of the Jewish committees. I only want to stress once again that this evacuation must take place as soon as possible. I had thought that the Jews will live in Poland for a long time. . . . Tomorrow we will say kaddish for the victims of the Kielce pogrom and we will make practical decisions.’ On anti-Jewish outbreaks and pogroms, see, for example, M. Hillel, Le Massacre des survivants en Pologne, 1946–1947 (Paris, 1985); D. Engel, ‘Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, . 1944–1946,’ Yad Vashem Studies, XXVI (1998), 43–85; K. Kersten, Polacy, Z.ydzi, Komunizm: Antynomia pól ´prawd (Warsaw, 1992); B. Szaynok, Pogrom Z ydów w Kielcach 4 lipca 1946 r. (Wroclaw, 1992). . . AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 6, Protocol 4, January 7, 1947, with participation of Meir Yaari. In April 1946 at a meeting of the Central Committee, Ignacy Falk insisted that ‘the delegation of the Central Committee that is visiting America is trying very hard to receive help for the Jews to re-build their life in Poland and not for organizing their emigration to Palestine.’ AAN, KRN, . . Presidium of the Board of Ministers, 23, p. 86. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 13, February 22, 1946. Gl 15,. 1947), 2; and see Gl . ´os Bundu, 7 [11], (August ´os Bundu, 4 (December 1, 1946), 4. See also, AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 35, May 8, 1946. Ibid. . . AZ. IH, CKZ. P, Presidium 2, Protocol 31, March 24, 1947. AZ. IH, CKZ. P, Presidium 2, Protocol 18, February 6, 1946. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 34, April 14, 1947. Ibid. Adolf Berman presented the idea that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs send a special delegation to Germany ‘in order to explain to the masses that creating panic and spreading rumours is bad for the Jews themselves because it reinforces anti-Semitism and may undermine the support of government officials,’ Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Zagranicznych (Archives . .of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, AMSZ) 6/1685/105, p. 21. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 35, May 8, 1946. AP in Wroclaw, Urzad Wojewódzki (UW), Social and Political Department, ‘ 696, pp. 2–47. See also a protocol from the meeting at the Jewish Committee, the Retired Home and . the Children’s Home in Niemcza, August 18, 1946, .AP Wroclaw, WKZ , 21, p. 22. AP Wroclaw, WKZ , 21, p. 22. Surely this expression was not official Zionist policy but rather reaction to the scope of illegal emigration, which . the Zionist movement could not easily cope with. See AP Wroclaw, WKZ, 15, p. 13, the Jewish Committee in S´widnica, August 5, 1946.

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33. See the Report from the Provincial Jewish Committee in Wroclaw for 1946, AP Wroclaw, UW, .Social and Political Department, 696, pp. 2–47. 34. AP Wroclaw, WKZ , 19, pp. 5–6 (Protocol of the Meeting of the Jewish Committee in Ziebice, August 4, 1946). ‘ 35. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, op. cit., p. 588. . 36. Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/5262, May 30, 1946, ´Lódz. . . 37. AZ. IH, CKZ. P, Presidium 1, Protocol 20, July 5, 1945. 38. AZ. IH, CKZ. P, Presidium 7, Protocol 43, May 8, 947. 39. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 37, May 21, 1946. Despite these rhetorical battles, the Zionists were not particularly threatened by the Bund. Only the PPR proposal for the creation of a joint, community-wide youth group brought sharp protests by the Zionists. Indeed, the Bund . and the . different Zionist organizations protested at this move; see AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 8, Protocol 85, October 27, 1947. The ‘Report on the Situation of the Jews in Poland and the Activities of PPR’ stressed the necessity of creating a Jewish scouting organization. While the organization would be nominally apolitical, it would, in fact, be controlled by the Jewish Communists. AAN, Akta Szymona Zachariasza (Files of Szymon Zachariasz) 22, . k. 1–10. . 40. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 37, May 21, 1946. It is important to stress that the idea was supported by the Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution . . Committee, and the World Jewish Congress. 41. AZ. IH, CKZ.P, Presidium 3, Protocol 62, July 31, 1946. 42. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 2, Protocol 41, June 4, 1946. The fact that the Committee . . found them guilty did not have any legal implications. 43. AZ IH, CKZ P Presidium 2, Protocol 48, June 25, 1946. The Bund representative responded in a similar way when a group of children disappeared from the Children’s Home in Chorzów. Fishgrund suggested that ‘two delegates of the Central Jewish Committee should have been immediately sent to Chorzów to carry out an investigation and question the leader of the Jewish Committee in Upper Silesia.’ He demanded that telegrams be sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Italy and in Hungary with information regarding . .the groups of children who had left Poland ‘illegally.’ 44. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 6, Protocol 4, January 7, 1947, with the presence of Meir . Yaari. . 45. AZ. IH, CKZ.P, Presidium 3, Protocol July 2, 1946. 46. AZ IH, CKZ P, .Presidium 7, Protocol 43, May 8, 1947. The Bund also opposed a CKZ P memo to the Anglo-American Committee because, as Leo Finkelshtayn stressed: ‘There are many Jews who want to immigrate to America, Argentina, Brazil and other places. The memo doesn’t even mention such options. It’s .a crime to consider Palestine as the only . possible solution,’ AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 5, Protocol, January 29, 1946. For . the resolution handed over to the Anglo-American Committee, see AZ. IH, Sekretariat 25B. . 47. AZ. IH, CKZ. P, Presidium 10, Protocol 43, May 15, 1948. 48. AZ. IH, CKZ.P, Presidium 11, June 16, 1948. . 49. AZ IH, . CKZ P, Presidium 3, Protocol 63, August 5, 1946; see also AZ IH, CKZ 2, Protocol 27, March 6, 1947. . P, Presidium . 50. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 9.

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. . 51. AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 11. Another subject of much dispute was the ceremonies commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Again, the Bund accused the Zionists of manipulating the ceremonies and using them for . . Zionist propaganda. See .AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 10, Protocol 31, April 15, . 1948; see also AZ IH, CKZ P, Presidium 10, Protocol 57, June 16, 1948. 52. Givat Haviva (5), 54.1–2 53. AAN, Akta Szymona Zachariasza, 28, pp. 160–70. In response to these accusations, Shuldenfray answered ‘There are Bundists who feel tempted to join Haganah or even the Zionist movement. Their hearts are with the fight in Palestine, just as there were once people who wanted to fight in Spain.’ 54. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, op. cit., p. 616.

18 Between New York and Moscow: the Fate of the Bund Archives Marek Web

In the article ‘The Historical Consciousness of the Early Bund’ the historian H. J. Tobias remarked: ‘The Bundists began to describe their history within a few years after the founding of their organization. That they felt the need to write it is in itself important, for it reflected their strong self-consciousness and their desire to explain why they had appeared on the political scene.’1 Writing the history of their party, continues Tobias, ‘helped to commemorate the past and to demonstrate the value of the organization.’ These comments about the early years of the Bund apply in equal measure to the entire course of the Bund’s history. The large number of memoirs by Bund leaders and activists, and a multitude of monographs, histories, and other writings by Bundist authors, point to a strong sense of pride in the accomplishments of their party and to a deeply ingrained need to leave a record for posterity. The spirit of historical consciousness also permeated the work of the Bund Archives, the repository of the Bund’s historical records. Founded almost at the same time as the Bund itself, the Archives very soon became one of the movement’s legends, in which even the modest task of gathering and preserving Party documents was seen as a revolutionary deed. The Archive is spoken of with reverence in the Bund, as a great treasure worthy of sacrifices. After one hundred years of existence punctuated by moments of high drama, anguish, and survival, the Bund Archives reached another turning point in its long history in 1994 when it was transferred to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. In the YIVO Archives, the Bund collection continues to serve as a source of information about the Bund.2 In this chapter I will discuss those aspects of the Bund Archives’ history that determined the nature and the scope of its collections. 243

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More specifically, I will focus on the East European collection, that is, the part of the Bund Archives which mirrors the Bund in the time of its greatest ideological and political strides among the Jewish masses, from its earliest years until the breakup of the Polish Bund in 1948–9. This is not to say that the documents of the Bund’s American period, which fill the other section of the Bund Archives, are less worthy of mentioning. This latter section is devoted to the Bund after the Second World War, and to Jewish participation in the American labor movement. It is well regarded among historians as a significant resource for the study of the contemporary labor movement in the United States of America. But this could be a topic for another article. With the founding of the Bund in 1897, and of its Foreign Committee in Geneva in 1898, the question of what to do with the influx of Party documents and literature soon came up. Copies of these materials, all made illegally in Russia and many written in code, were being sent to Foreign Committee members John Mill and Tsemakh Kopelzon, who utilized them in their propaganda work among the émigré Russian-Jewish students. As John Mill later recalled, the groundwork for the Bund Archives was laid with the publication (in Der yidisher arbeyter, number 7, of August 1899) of a call to the local organizations in Russia and Poland to send, to the archives, at least three copies of every new leaflet, brochure, and newspaper that was published locally. Mill also requested that the underground groups send to Geneva semi-annual reports of activities. In Russia proper, Dovid Kats [Taras] of the Bund’s Central Committee echoed the sentiments of his comrades from Geneva by issuing, in 1899, special instructions to the Bund groups urging them to heed the call for documents and to submit the required number of copies. The pressure on the local organizations can be discerned from the following text in Der yidisher arbeyter, number 10, in 1900: We appeal to all Bund committees as well as to the groups in smaller towns where committees have not yet been organized, to keep detailed statistics of strikes and arrests, and to send them to us each month. We need accurate information about the length of each strike, the number of strikers, the demands, and the outcome. Also, the number of arrests, the length of each conviction, and for how long a time those arrested were imprisoned. It is impossible to write the history of our movement without this information and to emphasize our accomplishments. . . . We should mention here those local committees that have failed to send us their leaflets. May Day

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proclamations have not been received from Vilna and Bialystok; Vitebsk did not send us their proclamation, nor did Minsk. . . .We have not received from Vilna their appeal to the hosiery workers and the proclamation about the Nayshtot disturbance [freeing of the arrested strikers].3 With so positive an attitude about gathering historical documents, it is not surprising that the Archives’ volume grew fast. The task of caring for the materials received was given at first to Iser Rabkin, a printer by profession. In 1903 the Foreign Committee, after a sojourn of three years in London, returned to Geneva and acquired permanent quarters in that city at 81 rue de Carouge. There, along with the Foreign Committee and with its publishing outfit Imprimerie Israélite, the Bund Archives was given considerable space to settle. ‘In 1904–1905 the largest room in the Bund quarters was already packed with archival materials and there was a need to add another room in order to accommodate new materials,’ Mill notes. In 1906 Franz Kursky took over as the Bund archivist and in him the Bund Archives found its lifelong curator and guardian. Kursky, who was born Shmuel Kohn in 1876 in Bauska [Boysk], Courland, was one of the Bund’s pioneers and party builders. He represented a formidable blend of revolutionary organizer and intellectual historian. Prior to his arrival in Geneva he was assigned jobs such as smuggling propaganda into Russia and preparing locations for clandestine Bund conferences. Arrested in 1904 and imprisoned in the Antokol prison in Vilna, he was freed by the amnesty that followed the 1905 revolutionary surge. Upon his arrival in Geneva, Kursky became the secretary of the Foreign Committee and the Bund’s liaison with the Socialist International, and also the Bund’s archivist. Kursky introduced better professional methods in the Archives. He worked on classifying the rich but rather unwieldy collection, and prepared shelf lists of publications. In time, the Archives opened its doors to readers, mainly East European political émigrés. Expatriate socialists of all persuasions living in the West were attracted to the Bund Archives by the diversity and completeness of its holdings, which were already superior to other collections specializing in the international labor movement. In fact, this was the only collection of archival and library materials established by a political party of the radical Left that was both a repository of a party’s records and a general library of labor and socialist literature. The Bund activists who were engaged in gathering materials for their archives spread the net far and

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wide, scooping into their collection a great number of publications, which were often printed in small quantities in secret locations and which were thus relatively rare even at the time of their issuance. More importantly, the Bund Archives preserved vast correspondence and other records of the Bund as well as of individuals and groups that were of central importance in the international labor movement of that time. By 1917 the Bund Archives had in its possession about 125 000 printed items – proclamations, leaflets, brochures, broadsides – in the following categories: (1) Russian revolutionary movements; (2) Jewish political affairs outside the Bund, i.e. those of the Socialist Zionists, General Zionists, Jews in the PPS, and Jewish anarchists; (3) Bund publications; (4) Socialist literature in Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and other languages; and (5) materials of the Socialist International. Manuscripts in the Bund Archives included about 30 000 pieces of the Bund’s own correspondence as well as a collection of several hundred letters and manuscripts of leading personalities in the socialist movement such as Bebel, Adler, Lenin, and Trotsky. The Bund’s own materials made up about 15 percent of the total volume.4

The First World War interrupted the comparatively tranquil existence of the Bund Archives. After the revolution of February 1917 in Russia, the Bund Foreign Committee was dissolved and its members prepared to return to the new, revolutionized Russia, and to bring the Archives with them. Kursky packed the Archives and library in 244 crates and left the crates with a shipping company in Geneva. He also asked the secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party to keep an eye on the Archives, and left for Berlin. Meanwhile, the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 put an end to the idea of bringing the Bund Archives to Russia. The crates lingered in storage in Geneva while Kursky and Vladimir Kossovsky in Berlin, Mill in Chicago and Baruch Charney Vladeck in New York pondered the collection’s future. The political fortunes of the Bund movement were being decided in Moscow and Warsaw. The Russian Bund was going through a process of liquidation, which eventually led the Kombund to merge into the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Bund to dissolve. The Bund in Poland suffered setbacks both from internal strife and from severe persecutions by the rightist government. The keepers of the Bund Archives had to decide to whom the collection actually belonged and where it should be moved. The answer to the first question was simple: with the Russian Bund heading into oblivion the

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Archives were to be attached to the Bund in Poland, which managed to establish itself as the world center of the Bundist movement. At the same time, however, the Polish Bund was in no position to receive the Archives and provide for its care from a financial perspective. Moreover, in all probability there must have been a consensus at that time that since conditions in Poland were far from stable for the Bund, it would be better for the Archives to remain abroad (at least temporarily). At this juncture, yet another claimant to the Bund’s documentary heritage appeared on the stage. For the Bolsheviks, the Bund Archives were of no small importance. The entire early history of the RSDRP, in which Bundists and those who later became Bolsheviks were early partners, was reflected in the Bund documents. Thus, certain circles in the new Soviet Russia wanted to pursue the acquisition of the Bund Archives. One story, which is often mentioned in commemorative articles, tells about two envoys from Russia who arrived in Geneva sometime in 1918 and tried to snatch the crates with the help of the same secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party, Fritz Platten, to whom Kursky had entrusted the collection. Evidently the secretary had gone Communist and agreed to procure the archives for the Russians. However, Kursky got wind of the unsavory doings and rushed to Geneva, saving the collection at the last moment.5 Shortly after Lenin’s death, the newly created Lenin Institute in Moscow expressed interest in acquiring the collection. Rakhmiel Weinstein [Vaynshtayn], a one-time Bund leader who had become a high official in the Soviet Ministry of Trade, was dispatched to Warsaw where he met with the chairman of the Bund Central Committee, Noyakh Portnoy. At that time the Bund was desperately seeking funds to revive the Bund Archives and, strangely enough, a deal with the Bolsheviks was explored. Initially, Vaynshtayn, who was the last chairman of the Central Committee of the Russian Bund, maintained that the Bund Archives had been the property of the Russian Bund,that the materials in the Archives reflected the history of the Russian Bund, and that, therefore, the Archives should be returned to Moscow – an argument which Portnoy rejected. However, the two former comrades, who had become ideological foes, ultimately arrived at a deal that allowed the Russians to copy or purchase parts of the collection. An official agreement was then worked out in October 1925 in Berlin between Kursky and Kossovsky representing the Bund, and a representative of the Lenin Institute.6 In brief, the Berlin agreement stipulated that the Lenin Institute would receive all the books and the periodicals from the Bund library,

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including complete runs of Socialist newspapers, all ephemera, published or hectographed, of which there was more than one copy in the Archives, and all original non-Bund materials (in such languages as Armenian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Italian, French, and English). The Bund’s own publications, as well as publications of other Jewish groups that the Archives did not have duplicates of, were to be copied for the Lenin Institute. Manuscript materials in the Archives were to be copied as well, and the Bund Archives was obligated to relinquish to the Lenin Institute original manuscripts by Lenin and other documents related to Lenin and his circle. In return, the Lenin Institute agreed to pay the Bund $20 000. This money would go toward transportation, unpacking and bringing the Archives into working order, and toward preparation of the promised copies.7 In May 1926 the crates packed by Kursky in 1917 were shipped from Geneva to Berlin. Rooms were rented in a building that belonged to the SPD, commonly know as the Vorwärts Building. The materials were unpacked, and Kursky returned to his old job as archivist. The Berlin period in the history of the Bund Archives lasted only a few years, 1926–33. Not much has been written about these years, except that the Archives functioned normally, the collection was accessible to readers, and new materials were being added to the files. Berlin in those years was an important Jewish cultural center, a haven for many Jewish expatriates from Eastern Europe who settled there after the First World War and the revolution in Russia. For a short while Berlin nurtured an influential intellectual and cultural community with an important voice in international Jewish affairs. For as long as it lasted, the Bund Archives was part and parcel of this life. The successes of the Nazis, and Hitler’s ascent to power, placed the Bund Archives in extreme danger. A few days after the Nazi electoral victory in February 1933, SA units surrounded the Vorwärts Building and all traffic in and out was controlled by them. At that late date, the Bund Central Committee dispatched from Warsaw to Berlin its representative, Dr Pizshits, who asked the Polish ambassador to Germany for help in protecting the Archives. However, the Polish embassy refused to get involved, and the envoy went back to Warsaw empty handed. Through contacts among socialist leaders, Léon Blum in France was alerted to the predicament of the Bund Archives (and of the Menshevik library, which was also stranded in the Vorwärts Building). Blum asked the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to declare the collections its property, and under this pretense, the French embassy in

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Berlin sent its people in May 1933 to remove the endangered collections from the Vorwärts Building and to ship them to France. For 60 days prior to the removal of the materials from the building, Kursky and a devoted friend of the Archives, Henokh Gelernt, entered the Vorwärts Building every day through a secret entrance and packed sacks with materials belonging to the Archives under the very noses of the SA guards. When their work was done and the documents were safely in the hands of the French, they followed the collection to Paris. The Archives went on its next journey packed in 150 sacks and four crates. Ironically, the Paris period in the history of the Bund Archives looked at one point as if it would replicate the Berlin experience. After seven years of normal existence in Paris, from 1933 to 1940, the Bund Archives found itself again in mortal danger from the Nazis. Once again, Kursky crated the materials and frantically looked for routes to escape. When all efforts to get a truck that would take the Archives southward failed, Kursky left it hidden as best as he could, and made his way to New York. The Archives, packed in 20 crates, remained in a ‘safe’ location until 1944, when the Germans discovered the place. They confiscated the Archives with the intent of sending it to Germany. However, the crates were abandoned by the Germans and left lying in a warehouse, apparently during the hasty German evacuation in the summer of 1944. As luck would have it, it has been alleged, some time thereafter a group of people came to this warehouse looking for their personal belongings – among whom was Hinda Riba [Ryba], a Bundist who had helped Kursky in packing and hiding the archives. Riba happened to notice the crumpled high school diploma of Vladimir Medem lying on the warehouse floor, and then she saw the crates, many of which had been opened, and the contents of which had been scattered. The Bundists in Paris were alerted to this discovery, and they took possession of the crates.

That was not to be the end of the Archives’ tribulations. The Second World War was over, but the Polish Bund had been all but destroyed in the Holocaust. The last valiant effort by Bundist survivors to revive the Party in Poland in the period 1945–8 soon came to an end. The post-war center of the Bund was in New York, where the World Coordinating Committee of Bundist Organizations was established in 1947, but the Archives remained in France because the Bund could not afford to ship them to the US. Franz Kursky made plans to go back to Paris and look after the Archives, but in 1949 he succumbed to illness. He died in January 1950.

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Finally, in 1951, with financial help from Frank Z. Atran, a lifelong Bundist and a dedicated sponsor of Yiddish cultural institutions, the Bund Archives was brought from France to New York where new quarters for the collection were prepared in the Atran Culture House on Madison Avenue and East 78th Street. The Archives arrived at its new destination in terrible shape. Emanuel Novogrudski poignantly wrote: When we saw the condition in which this greatest and richest collection of materials on the Jewish labor movement arrived . . . we were simply shattered [es iz undz gevorn finster far di oygn]. In the dozens of bulky wooden crates . . . rare manuscripts, letters, documents were lying in disorder, crumpled, torn – like bones in a common grave. Not a few among us were wondering how we would be able to reconstruct from these torn pages, these crushed folders, the glorious edifice of our past.8 Still, in a few years time, the Bund Archives was brought to a degree of accessibility sufficient enough to warrant the collection’s reopening. During the next 40 years, the Bund Archives was finally able to function as a historical collection and fulfill the purpose for which it was created: servicing scholars and researchers. It also continued to expand its holdings. In America, the Bund Archives, and especially its East European collection, is seen as an all-important link that connects the contemporary American labor movement to Jewish labor history and European tradition. Professor Norma Fain Pratt expressed it best when she wrote: The Bund Archives can be likened to an immigrant, coming to America and settling here, who possesses a vast treasury of European Jewish heritage. Like other immigrants, the Archives have changed and grown by incorporating the American experience; and the Archives have transformed their environment by offering European perspectives on the past and the present.9 The retelling of the history of the Bund Archives helps us to understand better the process of forming the collection. In this respect, the Geneva period must be considered especially productive because it was marked by an energetic, well planned ingathering of documents which over the years proved to be the core and the most valuable part of the Bund Archives. These are the records of the Russian Bund, and by

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extension, of the social democratic movement in the Russian Empire, from its very beginnings until the First World War. All crucial moments in the history of social democracy in Russia – the founding of the Bund and the RSDRP, the Zubatovshchina, the split in 1903, the revolutionary surge in 1905, and so on, are reflected in great detail in these records. The resolve to collect not only Bund materials but also documents of other organizations, including those Jewish parties with which the Bund was locked in a bitter ideological struggle, helped to create a collection which documents the entire spectrum of the radical Left inside Russia as well as among the political emigration in the West. Thus, the collection includes materials on the PPS and its Jewish Section, the PSR, the Poalei Zion, the Socialist Zionists, the Seimists, the anarchists, the General Zionists, and more. Printed materials dominate the collection, but some sub-groups, such as the section devoted to the Bund’s Foreign Committee, contain much correspondence, minutes, reports, financial records, and other types of original documents. The files of the several hundred support groups of the Bund which were active in Russia and in various parts of the world are of great interest. The business records of the Imprimerie Israélite, the publishing and printing establishment of the Bund in Geneva, shed much light on the ways in which revolutionary propaganda was disseminated in those days. The Archives has a nearly complete set of leaflets and pamphlets published by the Bund up to 1917, and all of the Bund’s illegal and semi-legal press dating from the Russian period. There is also a very rich collection of printed materials of other socialist and radical organizations of that period. During the Berlin and Paris years, the scope of the Archives was broadened, mainly in the areas which are now classified under the heading ‘European Socialism.’ Especially large are archival series on the history of the socialist movement in Germany and the SPD. Equally significant are materials on the Socialist Internationals, European trade unionism, and on other socialist parties in Europe. Strangely enough, there is little indication in the Bund Archives of a significant accumulation of materials from Poland, which may have been sent to Kursky before 1939. That might be explained by the fact that, while the center of the Bund movement was in Poland during the interwar period, the Bund Archives remained abroad, and its connection with the Bund in Warsaw was not all that clear. No correspondence between Kursky and the Bund Central Committee in Warsaw that would shed light on their mutual relations is extant in the Bund Archives. There is, moreover, no evidence that the Polish

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Bund was engaged in collecting archival materials for the Bund Archives in Berlin. Perhaps the Bund in Poland, existing as a legal party, with offices of its own and a large party apparatus, saw no compelling need to send its documents abroad. The reason for establishing the Bund Archives in Geneva was, after all, the illegal status of the party inside Russia, and the necessity of safeguarding the Party’s documents. Tragically, when the building in Warsaw that housed the Bund’s Central Committee was destroyed during the German air raids in September 1939, the records of the Polish Bund were also destroyed. The task of enhancing the East European collection, and of filling the gaps in the historical documentation on the Bund in Poland, fell to the Archives’ keepers in New York, most of them Holocaust survivors from Poland, who took charge of the collection in 1951. With great tenacity and over many years they built the collection on the Polish Bund from the ground up, reaching out to everyone they knew to have in their possession relevant materials. Thus, the collection is an aggregation of miscellaneous documents rather than an organically grown institutional archive, but its value and importance still remain significant. The portion of the collection devoted to the Bund in Poland contains documents of the Central Committee and of 160 local Bund organizations, materials of the Jewish trade unions, and materials of Bundist youth organizations. A separate group of documents pertains to the Polish Bund during the Holocaust period (including materials about Bundists in the Soviet Union and the Far East), and to the post-Holocaust years (until the dissolution of the Bund in Poland in 1949). Finally, among the press holdings in the Bund Archives, there are 134 daily newspapers and periodicals that were published in Poland. The topic of the Bund Archives does not end with the New York collection. More Bund documents can be found in several different archival repositories in Moscow. These collections complement the collection in the Bund Archives in New York, especially its section pertaining to the Russian Bund. When looking at post-Soviet archives, it must be kept in mind at all times that during the Soviet period there was a constant migrating of collections from one archive to another. The never-ending re-shuffling of archives, including those belonging to banned Jewish organizations and political parties, subjected the collections to chronic structural changes, breakups, and relocations. Collections appropriated by the Communist Party archives were customarily rearranged, and artificial collections were patched together without much regard for the

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provenance of the documents. The history of the archives of the Russian Bund exemplifies this process in every respect. After the dissolution of the Bund in Russia in the early 1920s, its archives were confiscated by the internal security organs and placed in the Central Archives of the October Revolution (Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktyabrskoi Revolutsii – TsGAOR) in Moscow, which was the repository for post-1917 Soviet-era records. There, the collection was broken up into two parts, one remaining at the TsGAOR, and the other transferred to the Central Party Archives. A smaller batch of Bund documents was given to the Museum of Revolution in Moscow. The collections were classified as restricted materials (sekretnyi fond), which meant that for many decades access to them was denied to most researchers. The following is a concise description of the Bund collections in Moscow:10 1.

Records of the General Jewish Labor Bund (Vseobsbshchii evreiskii rabochii soyuz – Bund), fond (collection) no. 271 at the Russian Center For Preservation and Study of the Documents of Contemporary History (Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii – RTsKhIDNI), under which name the former Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism is now known. The collection comprises 632 folders. The inclusive dates are 1874–1926. The collection was gathered over the course of two decades (1930–49), during which time materials were incorporated into it from other collections. A large portion of the collection, consisting of 501 folders, includes documents (mostly copies) that were purchased from the Bund Archives in Berlin in 1925. The remaining 131 folders include documents of the Russian Bund during its final years. Researchers will find in this group materials of local and district committees of the Bund in Russia and Ukraine, records of the Central Committee, and records of splinter groups which in the end merged with the Communist Party.

2.

Records of the Bund, fond R-8417 at the State Archives of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii – GARF), formerly the TsGAOR; inclusive dates: 1917–21; quantity: 93 folders. The collection has the same provenance as the previously mentioned collection at the former Central Party Archives. Both collections should therefore be considered parts of the same archival entity, the archives of the Russian Bund.

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The Moscow Museum of Revolution has a collection of Bund leaflets and pamphlets which was in all probability carved out from the original Russian Bund archives and given to this museum.

In 1992 these collections finally were taken off the list of restricted records. This change in their status has spurred projects to bring together all the Bund records via microfilming. Currently, at least one vendor, the Inter Documentation Company of Holland, is actively pursuing the goal of microfilming the Bund records. The collections described in this chapter are what archivists call ‘organic records,’ that is to say, the Bund’s own records. I did not venture here into another area of historical documentation, that of related records, such as papers of individuals who were active in the Bund, or government reports about Bund activities. These very rich sources for the study of the Bund movement have yet to be surveyed and described.

Notes 1. H. J. Tobias, ‘The Historical Consciousness of the Early Bund,’ Bulletin of the Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement, 2 [30] (Autumn 1980), 1. 2. The Bund Archives is registered in the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research as Record Group [RG] 1400. The Bund Archives contains 720 linear feet of material. The inclusive dates are 1870 to 1992. 3. Quoted in J. Mill, ‘Der emes vegn dem bundishn arkhiv,’ Unzer tsayt, April–May 1950, 53. 4. Information from Kursky for Elias Tcherikower, 1929. YIVO Archives, Papers of E. Tcherikower (RG 81), file 1441. 5. Letter from F. Platten to A. Natural, Lecoultre S.A., Zurich, August 30, 1918 (Bund Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York: MG 7–9). 6. J. Pat, ‘Frants kurski un der arkhiv fun bund,’ Der veker, XXIX 832 (February 1, 1950), 5–6. 7. The text of the agreement is in the YIVO Archives, RG 1400, RG folder. 8. E. Novogrudski, ‘Kvaln fun undzer geshikhte,’ Undzer gedank [Buenos Aires], X, 62 (November 15, 1955), 9. 9. N. F. Pratt, ‘Archival Resources and Writing Immigrant American Jewish History: The Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement,’ The Journal of Library History, XVI, 1 (Winter 1981), 166. 10. M. Kupovetskii, E. Starostin, and M. Web (eds), Dokumenty po istorii i kulture evreev v arkhivakh Moskvy. Putevoditel, Project Judaica (Moscow, 1997); see the index, p. 418, for rapid access to Bund-related references.

19 The Concept of National Cultural Autonomy: the First One Hundred Years Yoav Peled

What rights should be accorded minority cultures within a liberal society? Can minorities legitimately demand special rights, such as state protection from infringement by the majority culture which dominates the public sphere? Where should the boundaries be drawn between the rights of minority groups and the rights of individuals belonging to these groups? Are distinctions that can be drawn between different types of minorities – immigrants vs. indigenous peoples, territorial vs. non-territorial groups, ‘historical’ vs. ‘non-historical’ nationalities – relevant to the allocation of cultural rights? These are some of the questions that are at the crux of the contemporary debate over multiculturalism. These questions were also central to the historical debate over national cultural autonomy that took place around the turn of the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe. In this chapter I discuss three instances where demands for national cultural autonomy were, or are, being made – the debate between the Bund and Lenin in the first few years of the twentieth century, the contemporary work of liberal philosopher Will Kymlicka, and the current debate over the cultural rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. My purpose in analyzing these debates is to draw out some of the key issues involved and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various positions that have been taken over these issues in the course of the past century.

The Bund and Lenin The general contours of the debate between the Bund and Lenin over the Bund’s demand, adopted at its Fourth Congress (1901), for national 255

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cultural autonomy for Jews in the future Russian democratic republic, are too well known to be repeated here.1 The clearest and most elaborately argued statement in defense of the Bund’s position was Vladimir Medem’s essay ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy,’ published originally in the Bund’s Russian-language theoretical journal Vestnik Bunda, in 1904.2 That essay represented the first attempt by a Bundist writer to construct a theoretical justification, based on socialdemocratic (i.e. Marxist) principles, for the demand for national cultural autonomy – the theory of ‘neutralism.’ Medem’s objective in developing the theory of neutralism was to demonstrate that the ‘negative’ social-democratic principle of opposing national oppression required, by logical extension, that social democrats support the ‘positive’ task of providing each nation with the opportunity to freely develop its own culture through autonomous national institutions. He sought to do that, however, without making a ‘nationalist’ argument, that is, without assigning any value to national culture per se. The key to his theory was the idea that in the debate between ‘nationalists’ and ‘assimilationists,’ that is, between those who would promote and those who would suppress a particular national culture, social democrats should remain neutral. They should remain neutral because both ‘nationalists’ and ‘assimilationists’ were, knowingly or unknowingly, expressing the interest of the bourgeoisie of one nation or another in gaining control over the home market through national cultural hegemony. While not involving themselves in this debate, Medem contended, social democrats should actively oppose all organized attempts at either promoting or suppressing the culture of any particular nation, since only free competition between national cultural forms should determine which would survive and which would not.3 The novelty of Medem’s theory becomes apparent in his discussion of the particular case of the Jews. In Western Europe, he claims, Jews were granted equal civil and political rights by the triumphant bourgeoisie. But since those rights were given, not gained, the price the Jews had to pay for them was a heavy one, that of giving up their national identity and becoming French, German, and so on. Thus, the integration of Western European Jews into the cultures of their respective societies (which is what Medem means by ‘assimilation’) was forced upon them by the fact that they could not partake in those societies’ cultural and political lives while maintaining their own national (i.e. cultural) identity as Jews. This, for Medem, was a case of forced assimilation, of national oppression, and social democrats should seek to prevent it from happening in Russia.4

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In his discussion of Western European Jewry, Medem did not specify the mechanisms which, in his view, were used to force Jews to give up their national identity and assimilate into the surrounding societies. But it is clear, from the remainder of his essay, that what he had in mind was the fact that in Western Europe Jews could not participate in the political and cultural lives of their societies while continuing to use exclusively their own native language – Yiddish. Such linguistic discrimination (which is the only form of national oppression mentioned in the essay) should be opposed, Medem argued, not only because it involved coercion but also because it weighed most heavily on the proletariat. Since, of all social classes, workers were the least likely to know a foreign language, if their own native language was not used in the conduct of public affairs, and if cultural development in that language was not encouraged, then they were going to be completely cut off from the country’s political life and from the general culture. This would humiliate the workers and implant in their minds a slave mentality, a mentality which would hinder the development of their class-consciousness as well.5 To protect a nation from oppression, Medem further argued, the state must provide it with the instruments which would guarantee its ability to develop its culture in complete freedom. This could not be done through protective legislation only, since there were many ways of circumventing such legislation; for example, through a social boycott. Nor could one entrust the institutions of the state with the safeguarding of the rights of minority nations, since those institutions would inevitably be controlled by the majority nation, whether in the country as a whole or in any of its territorial subdivisions. The rights of minority nations could be guaranteed only if the provision of cultural services, particularly public education, were taken out of the jurisdiction of general state institutions and turned over to autonomous institutions which would be set up by each of the nations living within the Russian state, with no regard to territory. Such an arrangement would not only guarantee each nation the freedom to develop its own culture; it would also prevent the general cultural institutions of the state from becoming an arena for national conflicts. This would be particularly important, from a social democratic point of view, since national conflicts would tend to overshadow the class struggle and would draw the proletariat of each nation closer to the bourgeoisie of that nation in an effort to protect the national interest. Conversely, if each nation was entrusted with the direction of its own cultural affairs, the conflicts within its

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autonomous cultural institutions would be between representatives of different classes, and would promote, rather than hinder, the development of proletarian class-consciousness.6 Lenin, needless to say, objected vigorously to national cultural autonomy on many grounds, both theoretical and practical. He believed that non-territorial nations, which could not secede and form their own independent states, were destined to assimilate within the majority population. Such assimilation, he thought, was both inevitable and desirable, because capitalism required for its development large, ethnically homogeneous states. While he shared the Bund’s concern for the ‘negative’ prevention of national oppression and forced assimilation, and was willing to go an extra mile in protecting ethnic minority groups from assimilatory pressures, Lenin also believed that the process of voluntary assimilation should be allowed to take its course. The establishment of autonomous national school systems, the core demand of the program of national cultural autonomy, he argued, would mean setting up artificial barriers to assimilation. The separation from the economy, ‘which unites the nations,’ of education, ‘the most highly ideological sphere of social life . . . would give a free hand in these schools to “pure” national culture or the national cultivation of clericalism and chauvinism.’7

Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism8 The political theory of liberalism is based on an individualist moral ontology that regards individuals as fundamentally equal and as the exclusive ultimate bearers of political and social rights. Therefore, liberalism seeks to support and enhance the individual autonomy of all, i.e. the capacity of all persons to make, and revise, their own choices and develop their own individual life plans, by granting them equal civil rights and liberties.9 Will Kymlicka has argued, however, that the abstract liberal concept of equal citizenship perpetuates inequalities between groups and individuals by privileging those who conform to the underlying, and for the most part, unspoken norms of society, which have been defined and imposed as ‘normal’ by the dominant group – Western, white, Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual, property-owning family men – in accordance with their own interests and values. Hence, Kymlicka has sought to reconcile the liberal tenets of equality and autonomy with the attribution of special rights to ethnic and national minorities. The question Kymlicka posed to himself was: ‘How can we defend minority rights within liberalism, given that its moral ontology

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recognizes only individuals, each of whom is to be treated with equal consideration?’10 His answer was an attempt to ground collective rights in those of the individual by arguing that a person’s capacity to make autonomous choices about a preferred way of life is culturedependent, making the existence of a congenial cultural environment a prerequisite for the exercise of the individual right of autonomous, or free, choice. As Kymlicka put it: ‘only through having a rich and secure cultural structure . . . [can] people . .. become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value.’ Hence, concern for cultural structure ‘accords with, rather than conflicts with, the liberal concern for our ability and freedom to judge the value of our life-plans.’11 Much like Medem, Kymlicka has also stressed that the value he is concerned with ‘is the cultural community as a context of choice, not the character of the community or its traditional ways of life, which people are free to endorse or reject.’12 He uses the term ‘culture’ to denote a community of belonging, a social framework in which one can experience membership. His argument is that an individual needs to be part of a ‘societal culture’ in order to acquire the tools necessary for autonomous choice, such as self-respect, a selection of valuable options and different ways of life, a sense of history, personal capacity, agency and identity. In his view, while the specific values, beliefs, and rituals of a given culture may change over time, it is important that it continue to exist as ‘a viable community of individuals with a shared heritage.’13 Kymlicka’s underlying assumption is that individuals cannot take their decisions on how to lead their lives in a social and cultural vacuum. In one way or another, the range of options they consider is embedded in their cultural heritage, that is, in the form of life or ethos into which they are born and which determines their sense of who they are to a large degree. Individuals are situated in cultural narratives of various kinds: they live through, and inherit memories of, culturally specific individual and collective life-experiences which suggest what is worthwhile and valuable, and how they are to choose their ends.14 If the cultural heritage and standards of excellence of a minority culture are denigrated or marginalized by a dominant and exclusionary standard of civic virtue, and if access to role models, cultural norms and values, and participation in the common good are denied to members of a minority culture, their ability to achieve autonomy and make choices, that is, make and revise rational life plans and decide what is worthwhile, might be seriously impaired. Thus,

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‘[r]espect for the autonomy of the members of minority cultures requires respect for their cultural structure, and that in turn may require special linguistic, educational, and even political rights for minority cultures.’15 Kymlicka argues for special cultural rights as part of a liberal theory of equality, claiming that while the culture of the majority is not endangered, the cultural frameworks of traditional minority groups, such as the American or Australian Aboriginals, are in peril of disintegration if they do not get special protection.16 Hence, in order to grant members of minority cultures the same kind of autonomy enjoyed by the majority population, he deems it necessary to infringe upon the rights of the latter by supporting, for example, Aboriginal demands to restrict the property rights of whites in Aboriginal land and impose restrictions on migrant workers.17 As a whole, Kymlicka is ready to accord three types of rights to indigenous groups he considers national minorities: (1) Self-government rights, i.e. some sort of political autonomy or territorial jurisdiction, as well as a veto right over legislation affecting crucial Aboriginal interests. Though the Bund advocated neither political autonomy nor territorial jurisdiction, this type of rights corresponds to national cultural autonomy insofar as it entails viewing the minority group as a different people than the majority.18 (2) Polyethnic rights, i.e. state support for autonomous educational institutions, associations and festivals. (3) Special representation rights, i.e. mechanisms that guarantee group representation in order to ensure a voice for minorities and a fair hearing of their concerns in the state’s decision-making procedures. The last two types of rights Kymlicka is willing to accord as well to immigrant and ethnic groups, whom he does not regard as national minorities.19 According to Kymlicka’s liberal premises, the group as such has no inherent right to self-preservation or perpetuation. Its importance lies exclusively in its function as a facilitator of individual autonomy. Kymlicka is aware, however, that when minority groups themselves do not adhere to liberal principles, an individual’s right to freely choose a way of life may be endangered by the very cultural environment which makes this choice possible in the first place. Initially, at least, Kymlicka’s concern for the protection of cultural rights stopped therefore at the point where a group sought to dictate a way of life to its members: ‘A liberal theory can accept special rights for a minority culture against the larger community so as to ensure equality of circumstances between them. But it will not justify (except under extreme circumstances) special rights for a culture against its own

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members.’20 In other words, his concern was to protect ‘special’ cultural rights, but not ‘group’ rights. Thus Kymlicka insisted that valid claims of a minority culture to protection from external social forces did not entail the right to limit the autonomous moral choices of its members.21 In line with this reasoning, Kymlicka has stated that ‘finding a way to liberalize a cultural community without destroying it is a task that liberals face in every country once we recognize the importance of a secure cultural context of choice.’22 However, there are reasonable logical as well as historical–empirical grounds to assume that the liberalization of a culture which is based on illiberal principles may lead to its dissolution as a stable social framework. This means that, from their own perspective, multicultural liberals may be playing with fire when they attempt to liberalize illiberal cultures, since they may always discover ex post factum that they have undermined, rather than reinforced, what they conceive of as the necessary social condition of individual autonomy. Trying to find a way out of this dilemma, Kymlicka seems to have shifted his ground recently. He now argues that while liberals should identify and make known their preferences to illiberal groups in their midst, liberal states should not impose their liberal values on these groups. To support this position, Kymlicka draws a very unlikely analogy between illiberal domestic minorities and foreign sovereign states. Just as in the case of foreign illiberal states, liberals would not advocate imposing liberal values by force, so in the case of illiberal ‘national minorities,’ he argues, the liberal state should do no more than try to liberalize them by non-coercive persuasion.23 Kymlicka’s analogy challenges the very conception of the sovereign state as it has developed in modern political theory over the past three centuries. Rather than providing a solution to the contradictions of liberal multiculturalism, it testifies to Kymlicka’s inability to resolve them. For his argument results in the paradoxical conclusion that a government can, or must, refuse to protect some of its citizens from infringement upon their autonomy, if this infringement is caused by the conventions of an illiberal minority culture that has been given the right to self-government. Non-intervention in the face of illiberal practices violating individual autonomy can thus be justified as a measure of protection for individual autonomy, because it safeguards the cultural context of those citizens whose autonomy has been violated. Furthermore, Kymlicka’s advocacy of using state power to convince rather than coerce displays a certain naïveté concerning the nature of political and cultural exchanges and negotiations. Such transactions

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allow no clear-cut distinction between agreement, persuasion and coercion, since they take place between very unequal partners and involve the allocation of, and access to, a wide range of powerful material and cultural resources. Kymlicka’s limited understanding of the dynamics of cultural and social power downplays not only the difficulties faced by cultural minorities, but also the problem of freedom for individuals within these groups. His concern that a person should be able to freely choose an individual way of life, uncoerced by the group, completely ignores the problematic nature of the formation of choice within any social context. Coercion is the means of last resort for any social body seeking to induce conformist behavior in its members. Much more significant is the very structuring of the self and its socialization through the prevailing norms of the group, a process that takes place from the very beginning and throughout a person’s life, and not only at the moment one is about to make a particular choice. Through the control of access to means of action and conditions of self-development, such as education, employment and political participation, social groups – or rather, their elites – can deny recalcitrant members the means of realizing socially or culturally deviant choices without having to strip them of their free will or capacity for choice.24 Under such conditions it seems unlikely that one can ensure the ability to make autonomous choices by propping a modern conception of civil rights onto traditional social structures and cultural forms.

Theoretical coherence Both the Bund and Kymlicka argue for the preservation of minority cultures on the basis of moral outlooks – Marxism and liberalism, respectively – that view cultural integration as an ideal. They face, therefore, the difficult task of justifying national cultural autonomy without negating the value of integration in principle. They are also open to criticism, from their own respective ideological camps, for subverting the moral and theoretical principles to which they have pledged their allegiance. The Bund, operating from a Marxist perspective that looked forward to national amalgamation and integration, could not argue that the preservation of Jewish culture, or any national culture, was an important value in and of itself. This, as indicated above, would have opened it up to the allegation of being ‘nationalist,’ rather than simply ‘national.’ The Bund therefore argued that national cultural autonomy was required not

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because of the inherent value of cultural preservation, but for the interests of the Jewish working class in the Russian Pale of Settlement. If national cultural autonomy was only of instrumental value, in that it served the interests of the Jewish working class, what if it were shown that these interests could be better served by a different strategy on the national question? The Bund’s critics on both the Right and the Left, the socialist Zionists and Lenin, argued precisely that. The socialist Zionists claimed that the interests of the Jewish working class required the territorial concentration of Jews in an autonomous Jewish state, where Jewish workers could engage in a ‘normal’ class struggle, unhindered by national exclusion and oppression. Lenin argued that the interests of the Jewish proletariat dictated unity with non-Jewish workers, in order to fight the employers and the pogroms more effectively and enhance the revolutionary struggle. The Bund answered Lenin’s criticism, rather lamely, by claiming that according to the doctrine of neutralism it would support national cultural autonomy only as long as this program served the interests of Jewish workers. Lenin’s counter-claim, naturally enough, was that the Bund’s own nationalist agitation hindered the process of national integration and encouraged separatist tendencies among the Jewish workers, thus artificially creating the demand for national cultural autonomy. In a similar vein, Kymlicka, committed as he is to the individualist moral ontology of liberalism, has sought to argue for national cultural autonomy as a necessary precondition for the exercise of the personal autonomy of members of minority ethnic groups. As many of his liberal critics have shown, however, the value of personal autonomy can hardly carry the burden of justifying group rights. For many, if not most, of the groups that are likely to benefit from national cultural autonomy in the real world do not recognize personal autonomy as an important moral value, and according them collective autonomy would almost certainly mean a loss of personal autonomy to at least some of their members.25 And, as I have argued, uncoerced liberalization, on which Kymlicka ultimately pins his hopes for the solution of this problem, is hardly a convincing answer and may result in the loss of the very cultural identity Kymlicka is interested in preserving.

Autonomy for Israel’s Palestinian citizens These theoretical problems do not beset the proponents of national cultural autonomy for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Between 1948 and 1966 the Palestinians who were citizens of Israel were treated by the

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Israeli state as an occupied enemy population and were ruled through a Military Administration that, in effect, suspended most of their citizenship rights. Since 1966 they have formally enjoyed civil and political rights on an individual, liberal basis but have been excluded from political citizenship in the full sense of the term – that is, from participation in attending to the common good of society. This exclusion stems from Israel’s formal definition as a Jewish state: Jewish ethnicity is a necessary condition for membership in the political community, and the contribution to the process of Zionist redemption is a measure of one’s civic virtue. This conception necessarily excludes the Palestinians: as non-Jews they cannot belong to the ethnicallydefined community; as those from whom the land is to be redeemed, they cannot partake of Zionist civic virtue. Still, Israel’s Palestinian citizens are more or less secure in the exercise of their individual rights, as long as these rights do not conflict with the national goals of the Jewish majority. This caveat has had momentous consequences, however, especially for the Palestinians’ ability to enjoy the right of private property in land. Since 1948 about two-thirds of Palestinianowned land in Israel has been expropriated and turned over to (Jewish) national ownership. One important obligation that is also denied to most Palestinian citizens is military service, which is mandatory for most Jewish citizens. This exemption is not a matter of law but of administrative practice, and is probably unavoidable as long as the primary task of the Israeli military is to fight other Arabs.26 But many social rights in Israel were tied, and some are still tied, to the performance of military service, so that most Palestinian citizens either do not enjoy them or are entitled to smaller benefits.27 Moreover, since any notion of citizenship entails the equality of rights and obligations, the Palestinians’ exemption from military, or other, national service is highly emblematic of their exclusion from attending to the common good. It has also become a major issue in the debate over their liberal citizenship rights. The exclusion of Palestinian citizens from attending to the common good was formalized for the first time in 1985, in an amendment to the law governing elections to the Knesset. The purpose of this amendment was to create the legal means for disqualifying political parties on the basis of their ideology, which had been previously impossible under the law. Its immediate targets were Rabbi Meir Kahane’s racist Kach party, which called for the ‘transfer’ of all Palestinians, citizens and non-citizens alike, out of the Land of Israel; and the Progressive

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List for Peace (PLP), a Palestinian political party that was viewed by the state as overly nationalistic. After a series of administrative and legal maneuvers, Kahane’s party was indeed disqualified in 1988 and the PLP was not.28 In the deliberations leading to this outcome it became clear, however, according to legal scholar David Kretzmer, that participation in Knesset elections could be legally denied to a list of candidates ‘that rejects the particularistic definition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, even if the list is committed to achieving a change in this constitutional fundamental through the parliamentary process alone.’ Moreover, in Kretzmer’s view, the decision also implied that on the decidedly fundamental level of identification and belonging there cannot be total equality between Arab and Jew in Israel. The state is the state of the Jews, both those presently resident in the country as well as those resident abroad. Even if the Arabs have equal rights on all other levels the implication is abundantly clear: Israel is not their state [original emphasis].29 Since Palestinian citizens are not allowed to integrate on an equal basis into Israeli society, many of them have come to demand national cultural autonomy. One Palestinian political party, the Democratic National Alliance, that has had one representative in the 14th and the 15th Knessets, has already made the demand for national cultural nonterritorial autonomy the central plank of its platform. In June 1997, its representative in the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, introduced a series of legislative proposals aimed at implementing this demand. His proposals were unanimously supported by all Palestinian Members of Knesset.30 Sammy Smooha has summarized the positions of the two sides on the issue of national cultural autonomy: The Arabs [i.e. Palestinian citizens] demand non-territorial institutional autonomy: control over their educational system, state recognition of Arab national organizations . . . the freedom to form nationalist Arab parties, the right to establish an Arab university, and a proportional share of the national resources. Israel rejects this drive for autonomous institutions because it appears as impinging on its Jewish–Zionist character and engendering secessionist sentiments. It grants Arabs an ethnic (religious, cultural, linguistic) minority status while they pursue a Palestinian national minority status [emphasis added].31

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Palestinian national autonomists like Bishara have an important political advantage over the Bund and Kymlicka, in that the state from which they demand national cultural autonomy does not even claim to be neutral with respect to its citizens’ cultural identity or conceptions of the good.32 Moreover, their advantage is not only political, it is theoretical as well. For them cultural preservation (whether of their own culture or of all minority cultures) is a value in its own right, and they do not have to try to base it on more fundamental moral principles. Thus they are immune to the kind of criticism that stems from alleged discrepancies between the demand for national cultural autonomy and the more fundamental principles which are supposed to uphold it.

Political efficacy Political struggles are rarely won or lost on the strength of theoretical arguments alone. The Bund, despite its theoretical weakness, was successful in mobilizing large numbers of Jewish workers behind its program of national cultural autonomy, both during the final decades of the Czarist Empire and in interwar Poland. Its success stemmed from the fact that it appealed to Jewish workers who were caught in an impossible situation in the labor market, between Jewish employers interested in economizing on their labor costs and non-Jewish workers willing and able to sell their labor power for less. Since this predicament prevented Jewish workers from developing either class solidarity with non-Jewish workers or Zionist solidarity with Jewish employers, national cultural autonomy seemed like a workable solution.33 National cultural autonomy is also gaining ground among Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who are faced with a state that would not include them in its core citizenship community but grants them a whole array of individual citizenship rights. In 1988 Smooha found that 47.5 percent of the Palestinian respondents in an attitude survey he conducted supported the option he defined as ‘consociationalism’ (‘allowing Arabs to organize independently and become partners in state institutions’ and ‘granting Arabs separate legal status, like the autonomy offered to the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip’). In 1976, only 36 percent of Palestinian respondents had supported that option. More significantly, perhaps, support for this option among Jewish respondents increased from 5 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 1988. Among Palestinian respondents, about an equal number (48.3 percent) supported the liberal-democratic option (‘achievement of equality and

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integration with Jews’), while among Jewish respondents this option was supported, for the first time, by fewer people (15.3 percent) than the consociational one.34 Support for autonomy had increased significantly among Israel’s Palestinian citizens by 1995, when it was the arrangement favored by the largest number of respondents – 81.5 percent. The second largest number – 66 percent – supported what Smooha defined as ‘improved ethnic democracy’ – a more limited version of autonomy, maintaining Israel’s character as a Jewish–Zionist state (respondents, evidently, were not limited to one choice only). Of three possible ‘liberal democratic’ arrangements, the most popular was supported by 40.5 percent. Unfortunately, the consociational option was not presented to Smooha’s Jewish respondents in 1995, but by far the largest number among them – 71.5 percent – supported the ‘improved ethnic democracy’ option. Only 4.5 percent supported the one ‘liberal democratic’ option Jewish respondents were asked about.35 It is an historical irony that Zionists, who objected fiercely to the Bund’s program of national cultural autonomy in the diaspora (although certain Zionist parties did adopt it later on as an interim measure), are now faced with a very similar demand on the part of the Palestinian minority within the Jewish state. However, unlike the Russian social democrats at the beginning of the 20th century, and Western liberals today, Israeli Zionists may find it easier to accommodate the Palestinian demand for national cultural autonomy than their demand for equality of citizenship rights within a liberal-democratic framework. For the latter demand would entail redefining the state, from a Jewish state to a state of its citizens, while the former may be accommodated through a consociational structure where both Jews and Palestinians, recognized as different peoples, will be able to express their national cultural identities.

Conclusion The idea of national cultural autonomy, as conceived by Karl Kautsky at the end of the 19th century, was an effort to preserve the unity of the Austro-Hungarian state (and of its social democratic party) while recognizing the right of each of its constituent nations to selfdetermination.36 The Bund adopted this idea out of its pessimism regarding the ability of Jewish workers to integrate on an equal footing into the industrial working class in the future democratic Russia. (Neither the Bund nor the local Jewish workers’ parties and movements believed that

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Jews in Britain and the United States needed national cultural autonomy.)37 A century later, the most prominent advocate of liberal multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka, is still deeply pessimistic about the ability of Canada’s ‘minority nations,’ the Québécois and Aboriginal nations, to integrate with English-speaking Canadians. He therefore proposes (territorial) national cultural autonomy as a way of maintaining the unity of the Canadian federation.38 The persistence of national cultural autonomy as an important item on the political agenda of liberal societies (not to mention Israel, which is not a liberal society) attests to nothing else but the failure of the project of nation-building, or national integration, in modern capitalist societies. This project was promoted, and believed in, by two of the three major ideologies of the modern era – Marxism and liberalism – and their turn to national cultural autonomy in consequence of its failure represents a major concession to their most important rival–nationalism. But, as I have shown, grafting national cultural autonomy onto the theoretical bases of Marxism and liberalism resulted in awkward, unconvincing theoretical formulations. National cultural autonomy is rooted in the theoretical home terrain of nationalism. The moral commitment underlying it is a commitment to particular cultural–historical forms of group life, not to the freedom and equality of individuals. By adopting national cultural autonomy, even as an instrumental measure, both Marxism and liberalism transgress against their own core values. A much more useful way of addressing the issue of cultural diversity in modern society would be to investigate the causes of the failure of integration.

Notes 1. See Y. Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (London, 1989). 2. References here are to the Yiddish version, ‘Di sotsial-demokratie un di natsionale frage,’ in Vladimir medem: tsum tsvantsikstn yortsayt (New York, 1943), pp. 173–219. 3. Ibid., pp. 178–85, 187–90. 4. Ibid., pp. 176–7. 5. Ibid., pp. 191–2. 6. Ibid., pp. 195–6, 202, 207, 208–9, 211–16. The point contained in the final sentence of this paragraph does not appear in Medem’s essay but was made by some of his supporters during the debate in the Fifth Bund

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Congress (1903); see Peled, Class and Ethnicity, op. cit., p. 149, n. 117. 7. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XIX (Moscow, 1963), pp. 531–3. 8. This section is based on Y. Peled and J. Brunner, ‘Culture is not Enough: A Democratic Critique of Liberal Multiculturalism,’ in Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State, ed. S. Ben-Ami, Y. Peled, and A. Spektorowski (Basingstoke, forthcoming). 9. See A. Ingram, A Political Theory of Rights (Oxford, 1994); R. M. Smith, ‘The Constitution and Autonomy,’ Texas Law Review, 60 (1982), 175–205. 10. W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford, 1989), p. 162. 11. Ibid., pp. 165, 167. 12. Ibid., p. 172. 13. Ibid., p. 168. 14. Ibid., p. 165; see also J. Raz, ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective,’ Dissent, 41 (1994), 67–97. 15. W. Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,’ Ethics, 99 (1989), 183; see also J. Brunner and Y. Peled, ‘Rawls on Respect and Selfrespect: An Israeli Perspective,’ Political Studies, XLIV (1996), 287–302. 16. Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism,’ op. cit., 189. 17. W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995), p. 43. 18. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, op. cit., p. 147; Multicultural Citizenship, op. cit., p. 181. 19. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, op. cit., pp. 26–33, 75–151. 20. W. Kymlicka, ‘The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas,’ Political Theory, 20 (1992), 140–6. 21. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, op. cit., pp. 195–8. 22. Ibid., p. 170. 23. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, op. cit., pp. 163–70. 24. See C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (Cambridge, 1988). 25. See Peled and Brunner, ‘Culture is not Enough,’ op. cit. 26. M. Hofnung, Yisrael – bitchon ha-medina mul shilton ha-chok, 1948–1991 (Jerusalem, 1991), pp. 237–8. 27. D. Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel (Boulder, CO, 1990), pp. 98–107. 28. Y. Peled, ‘Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State,’ American Political Science Review, LXXXVI, 2 (June 1992), 432–43. 29. Kretzmer, The Legal Status, op. cit., p. 31. 30. Ha-brit ha-leumit ha-demokratit – matsa (Nazareth, [1996]); A. Bishara, Autonomia la-ezrachim ha-falastinim shel yisrael (Jerusalem, 1992); ‘Al sheelat ha-miut ha-falastini be-yisrael,’ Teorya u-vikoret, 3 (1993), 7–20; ‘Haaravi ha-yisraeli: iyunim be-siach politi shasua,’ in Tsiyonut: pulmus ben zemanenu (Sede Boker, 1996), pp. 312–39; S. Ozacky-Lazar and A. Ghanem, Arab Voting Patterns in the 14th Knesset Elections, 29 May 1996 (Givat Haviva, 1996); S. Smooha, ‘Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,’ Israel Studies II, 2 (Fall 1997), 198–241. 31. S. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, vol. II: Change and Continuity in Mutual Tolerance (Boulder, CO, 1992), p. 266. 32. Bishara demands both the neutralization of the State of Israel, that is, its

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 redefinition as a liberal state of its citizens, and national cultural autonomy. But the force of his argument comes from the fact that the state is not neutral. Needless to say, the Romanov Empire was not a neutral state either, but the debate between the Bund and Lenin concerned the future Russian republic, not the contemporary Russia state. Peled, Class and Ethnicity, op. cit. Smooha, Arabs and Jews, op. cit., p. 113. Smooha, ‘Ethnic Democracy,’ op. cit., 231. J. Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York, 1992), pp. 36–7. J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981). W. Kymlicka, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (Toronto, 1998).

Index

Abramovitch, Raphael (Rafail Abramovich Rein), xii, 48, 52 Adler, Friedrich, 187, 188, 190 Adler, Max, 177, 178n22 Adler, Victor, 134, 173, 184, 246 Agudes Yisroel, 120, 228 Alter, Ayzyk, 7 Alter, Victor, xiii, 69, 72, 73–4, 75, 84, 85, 86, 109, 163, 180, 203 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 180 Amsterdam, 184 anarchists, 50, 51, 246, 251 Andreyv, Leonid, 123 Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine, 222, 241n46 anti-Semitism, 42, 64, 69, 75, 77, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 183, 220 Austria, 172–4, 177 Lodz, 92, 100, 107 and national ideology of Bund, 197–212 Antwerp, 64, 144 Arbeiter-Zeitung, 146–7, 173 Arbeter-sportler, 62, 63 Der arbeyter, 32, 42 Di arbeyter shtimme, 18, 35, 36, 37, 91, 117–18, 122 Arcibashev, Michael, 123 Aronson, Grigori, 52 Asch, Sholem, 123 Asiats, 230 ASKÖ (Workers’ Federation for Sports and Physical Culture in Austria), 63 assimilationism, xvii, 48, 116, 134, 147, 173–4, 175, 176–7, 183, 184, 205, 256, 258 Association of Commerce Employees, 10

Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists, 126 Atran, Frank Z. (Efroyim Zalman Atran), 250 Atran Culture House, New York, 250 Australia, 49 Austria socialists and sports organization, 67n12 see also Galicia Baptists, 7, 9 Bauer, Otto, 138, 148, 173, 176–7 BBWR (Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government), 162 Bebel, August, 246 Beck, Georgii, 50 Beker, Yoysef, 112 Berger-Barzilai, Joseph 189 Berlin, 76, 203, 246 Bund, 49–50, 52–3 Bund Archives, 248–9, 251, 253 Berman, Adolf, 83, 234, 235, 240n29 Berman, Pavel, 49, 50 Bern, 50, 160 Bialystok, xiii, 7, 34, 90, 91, 112, 117, 161, 162, 245 Bibliotekn tsenter, 125 Bibliothèque Nationale, 248 Bielsk, 144 Bikher velt, 123–4 Birenshtok, Shlama, 93 Birentsvayg, Mikhael, 93 Birnboym, Ruven, 136 Birobidzhan, 76 Bishara, Azmi, 265, 266 Biuletin, 206–7 Blatman, Daniel, 213–14, 223–4 Blit, Barbara, 180–1 Blit, Lucjan (Lutsian), 180–1, 223 Bloshteyn, Oyzer, 112 271

272

Index

Blum, Abrasha, 208 Blum, Léon, 187, 188, 248 Bolsheviks, xii, xvii, xix, 75, 156, 160, 184, 186–7, 192, 200, 247 Borokhov Yugnt, 228 Borski, Jan Maurycy, 166 Boymgarten, Nisen, 105, 106 Boysk, 245 Brandt, Willy, 181–2 Brenner, Lieber (Liber Brener), 221 Brest-Litovsk, 166 brichah, 209 Briderlikhkeyt, 134 Britain, 268 and Zionism, 185–6, 189, 234–5 Brod, Jakob, 174 Bronislav Groser Library Lodz, 105 Warsaw, 125 Bros, Yankef ,146 Brumberg, Abraham, 166, 167 Brünn, 138, 174 Brussels, 156, 157 Buenos Aires, 53 Bukovina Bund see Jewish Social Democratic Association Bund Bulletin (Jewish Press Agency), 216 Bund Archives, 243–54 Bund in Russian Empire (General Jewish Workers’ Bund in Russia and Poland, later General Jewish Workers’ Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia) Central Committee, 18, 20, 31, 36–7, 38, 39–40, 41, 42, 51, 90, 91, 141, 159, 253 Congresses: Founding (1897), 30, 90, 91, 155; Second (1898, 91; Third (1899, 91; Fourth (1901), 34–8, 156, 255; Fifth (1903), 268–9n6; Sixth (1905), 38–9, 40–1, 42, 146; Seventh (1906), 146; Eighth (1971), 146, 186 Conferences: Seventh (1906), 41–2; Eighth (1910), 113, 146, 159; Twelfth (1920), xii Foreign Committee, 18, 20, 31–8,

40, 46, 47, 50, 51–2, 134, 147, 244, 245, 246, 251 in Poland (Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland) Central Committee, 83, 85, 125, 222, 248, 251, 252 Conferences: Unification Conference (Cracow, 1920), 161; Second (Danzig, 1921), 73, 82; Fourth (Warsaw, 1929), 73, 191; Fifth (Lodz, 1930), 73, 74, 108, 163, 191; Sixth (Warsaw, 1935), 205 Congresses: Jubilee (40th Anniversary, 1937), 166 post-Holocaust: Lublin (1944), 219; Lodz (1945), 220–1 World Conference of Bundist Organizations (1947), 210 World Coordinating Committee of Bundist Organizations, 209, 210, 249 see also Central Union of Bund Organizations in the USA; Jewish Social Democratic Association Bund (Bukovina Bund); Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland (1897); Kombund; Kombund fraktsie; Latvian Bund; Social Democratic Bund; United Organization of Workers’ Associations and Support Groups to the Bund Abroad and individual locations Der bund, 18, 39–40, 94 Bureau for Matters Concerning Aid to the Jewish Population of Poland, 215 Camp of National Unity see OZON Canada, minority rights, 268 ‘Carougeke’, 51 Catholic bloc, 162 Central Archives of the October Revolution, see TsGAOR Central Committee. of the Jews in Poland see CKZ P Central Jewish Historical Commission, 216

Index Central Party Archives, 253 Central Union of Bund Organizations in the USA, 48–9 Centrolew, 164 CGT (General Confederation of Labor), 51 Chicago, 246 Christian Democrats (Lodz), 98 civil. rights, xi, 186, 256, 267 CKZ P (Central Committee of the Jews in Poland), 209, 218, 222, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236–7 Cold War, 214 Comintern (Communist International), xvii, 73, 81–2, 87–8, 161, 183, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 200 Communist Party of Germany – Opposition see KPDO Communist Party of Palestine (PCP), 189 Communist Party of Poland see KPP Communist Party of the Soviet Union, xii, 82, 86, 88, 246, 252 Communist Workers’ Party of Poland see KPRP Comrie, B., 16 consociationism, 266–7 Cöthen, 49 Cracow Bund and PPS, 164 . Bund and Z PS, 135, 137, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146 Bundist sports organizations, 60, 66 Nazism, 207 post-Holocaust, 220 cultural activities and issues, xii-xiii, xviii, 48 between world wars, 112–30, 166 Lodz, 99, 105 Morgnshtern and significance of cultural hegemony, 59–68 post-Holocaust, 208–9, 210, 217–19, 221–2, 233, 236 . Z PS, 145, 148 Czech Social Democratic Workers’ Party, 147

273

Czech sports organizations, 66–7n12 Czechoslovakia crisis (1938–9), 108, 204, 205 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference (1908), 146 Czestochowa, 220, 221, 222 ‘ Danzig, 73, 82 Darmstadt, 49 Daszy´nski, Ignacy, 134, 136, 147 Democratic National Alliance (Palestine), 265 Deutsch, Julius, 63 Diamand, Hermann, 134, 135, 163, 175 Dimant, Dobra ,93 Dresden, 49 Dror, 218, 228, 239n17 . Dzierzyn ´ ski, Feliks, 22, 137 ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International), 190 education, xii, xviii, 16, 59, 87, 112–17, 166, 201 Galicia, 134, 137, 148, 176, 177 Lodz, 99, 105 and national cultural autonomy, 258 post-Holocaust, 233 Eichler, Willi, 179, 180, 182 Ek, Volf, 142 Elman, Sheyne, 93 emigration, xv, 70, 77, 166, 205, 209, 223, 227, 229, 230, 231–7 Engels, Friedrich, 173, 177 Erlich, Henryk, xii, xiii, 69, 72, 75, 86, 115, 159, 160, 163, 180, 186, 187–90, 191, 201, 202, 204 ESDRP-PZ (Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party Poalei Zion), 48, 49, 99, 185, 251 Evian Conference, 204 Evreiskii rabochii, 118 Evsektsiia (Jewish Section [of the Communist Party]), 53 Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), 190

273

274

Index

extraterritorial Jewish nationality, theory of, 32, 34, 38–9 Eyneygler, Karol, 136 Eynhorn, Dovid, 83 eynsers (the ‘ones’), 82–8 Falanga, 166 Falk, Ignacy, 229, 232, 233, 235, 240n21 Fareynigte (United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party), 114, 115 fascism, 162, 166, 203, 205 see also Nazism Fayner, Leon, 83–4 Federation of the Polish Jews in America, 239n14 Finkelstein, Leo (Finkelshtayn), 219, 241n46 Fishgrund, Salo, 229, 230, 231–2, 233, 234, 239n14, 241n43 Fishman, William, 50 Fogel, Gershon, 231 Folkstsaytung, 119–22, 124, 125, 126 see also Naye folkstsaytung Ford, Alexander, 72 Foroys, 125 Forverts (Forwards), 134, 140 France, 234 Bundist/socialist relations, 182 see also Paris France, Anatole, 121 Frank, Hans, 206 Frankel, Jonathan, 43n3 Frankfurt, 182 Der frayhayts-glok, 94 Fridman, Yankef, 124 Friedberg, 49 Frishman, Dovid, 123 Frug, Shimon, 123 Frumkin, Boris, 91 Frumkin, Ester Lifshits see LifshitsFrumkin Galicia Austro-Marxism and Jews, 172–8 Jewish Social Democratic Party and the Bund, 133–54 schools, 117 GARF (State Archives of the Russian

Federation, formerly TsGAOR), 253 Gdanski, Fayvel, 93 Gegenwartsarbeit, 228–9, 230 Gelernt, Henokh, 249 general strike (March 17, 1936), xiii, 120, 205–6 General Zionists, 48, 216, 246, 251 Geneva, 49, 50, 51, 181, 251 Bund Archives, 245, 246, 247, 250, 252 Foreign Committee, 31, 244, 245 German Social Democratic Party in Poland, 162, 164 Germany 202–4 Bund Archives, 248–9, 251 Bund groups, 49–50, 52–3 Jews in, 203, 232 Gilinski, Shloyme, 72 Glazman, Borekh, 121 Globus, 125 Gl 147 ´os, Gl os Bundu, 118 ´ Godesberg program, 179 Goldbergowa, Felicja, 71 Goldmakher, Yitzkhok, 93 Goldstein, Bernard, 167 Gorky, Maxim, 123 Gostynin, 233 Gozshanski, Shmuel (Lonu), 14, 40, 145, 146 Gralak, Ignacy, 103 Gramsci, Antonio, 59, 65 Grinblat, Roza, 90 Grodno, xiii Gromyko, Andrei, 235 Groser, Bronislav (Slavek, Adolf Shteyn), 40, 41, 105, 114, 125, 137, 144, 147, 151n24 Groser klub, 126 Grossmann, Henryk, 133, 135, 136, 137, 141, 143, 146, 148, 152nn56,57 Gurcman, Benedykt, 95 Gutman, Feliks, 151n32, 152nn50, 56 Häcker, Emil, 137 Haganah, 242n53

Index Halle, 49 Hamburg, 187 Hashomer Hatzair, 228, 234, 239nn13,17 Haynt, 120, 129n34 Hebrew Socialist Union, 9–10 Hechalutz, 230, 239n13 Heidelberg, 49 Heine, Heinrich, 21 Heller, Binem, 124 Henderson–Webb Declaration, 186 Hennsler, Fritz, 182 Herman, Dovid, 127 Herszenhorn, Szlomo (Shloyme Hershenhorn), 215–16, 219, 229, 231, 234 Hertz, Jacob S. (I. Sholem Herts), 6, 109n1, 199 Hirshbayn, Perets, 123 Hirshfeld, Eda, 93 Hitachdut, 228, 237 Hitler, Adolf, 201, 203, 204 Hodes, Leyvik, 86 Di hofnung, 19 Hofshteyn, Dovid, 121 Holocaust, 65 national ideology of Bund, 197–212 survivors, 165, 220, 227–8 Homel pogrom, 156 Horontshik, Shimen, 121 Horwitz, Maksymilian, 137 Hurvitsh, Tsivia, 91, 93, 98 Ichud, 216, 228, 233, 234, 237 Imprimerie Israélite, 245, 251 Independent Socialist Labor Party, 106 Inter-Documentation Company, 254 International, Second see Socialist International International, ‘Second-and-a-half’ see International Working Union of Socialist Parties International, Third see Comintern International Information Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Parties (Paris Bureau), 83, 191 International Socialist Bureau see ISB

275

International Working Union of Socialist Parties (‘Second-and-ahalf’ International, Vienna Union), 52, 83, 187 internationalism, 35, 48, 96, 158, 183, 198, 208, 220 ISB (International Socialist Bureau), 184, 185 Iskra, 74, 75 Israel, 213, 214, 215, 235, 237 and national cultural autonomy for Palestinians, 263–7 Italy, 234 Jacobs, Jack, 43n3, 53, 184–5 Jakobi, Sinai, 135 Janów, 142 Jaszu´nski, Gerszon see Yashunski Gershon Jena, 49 Jewish Agency, 188, 233, 234, 241n40 Jewish Agitation Committee, 135, 136 Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund see Kombund Jewish community, 3, 4, 8–10, 163 Jewish community councils, 87, 143 Jewish Fighting Organization, 239n13 Jewish Labor Committee, xiii, 53, 209 Jewish Press Agency, 216 Jewish Section of the PPSD see PPSD Jewish Social Democracy of Galicia (formerly Jewish Section of the PPSD), 140 Jewish Social Democratic Association Bund (Bukovina), 144 Jewish Social Democratic Party of . Galicia see Z PS Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party Poalei Zion see ESDRP-PZ Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party Poalei Zion in Austria, 135 Jewish Society for the Dissemination of Education (St Petersburg), 113 Jewish Workers’ Bund in Poland (1897), 30

276

Index

Jogiches, Leo, 136 Johnpoll, Bernard K., 167 Joint Distribution Committee, 241n40 Judenschutztruppe, social democracy seen as, 174 Kach, 264–5 Kahane, Meir, 264–5 Kalkshteyn, Pinkhes, 93 Karlsruhe, 49 Karski, Jan, 83 Kashe, Yankl, 93 Kasprzak, Marcin, 95 Kats, Dovid (Taras), 244 Kaufman, M., 102 Kautsky, Karl, 33, 34, 172, 267 Kazdan, Khayim Sh., 115, 124 Kegn shtrom, 85 kehiles 87, 89, 143, Kempfer group, 51 Khayfets, Avrom, 101 khevres (bractvo), 4, 5, 6, 8 Khmurner, Yoysef (Yoysef Leshtshinski), 75, 84, 85–6, 87, 88, 115, 120, 124, 163, 203 Kielce pogrom (1946), 230, 232 Kinder fraynd, 125 Kishinev pogrom, 49, 50, 95, 156 Kisman, Yoysef, 152n56 Klal yisroel, 119 Kletskin, Boris, 130n37 Kleyne folkstsaytung, 120, 121 Kligsberg, Moyshe, 60 Kokotzinski, Ignatz, 98 Kombund (Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund in Poland), xvii, 104, 161, 187 Kombund (Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund in the Ukraine, Russia and Belorussia), 246 Kombund fraktsie, 161 Königsberger trial (1904), 48 Konopnitski, Moyshe, 9, 91 Kopelzon, Tsemakh (Timofei Markovich, Grishin), 244 Korczak, Janusz (Henryk Goldszmit), 120 Kosover, Mendel, 233

Kossovsky, Vladimir (Nokhum Mendl Levinson), 31, 40, 53, 70, 71, 74–8, 117, 185, 186, 202, 203, 246, 247 Kovner, Abba, 230 Kovno, 74 KPDO (Communist Party of Germany – Opposition), 192 KPP (Communist Party of Poland, previously KPRP), 87, 88, 104, 108, 126, 161, 164, 208, 236 KPRP (Communist Workers’ Party of Poland, 1918–1925), xvii, 137 see also KPP Kremer, Arkadi (Aleksandr), 30, 31, 48, 70, 73, 74 Kremer, Pati, 70 Kretzmer, David, 265 Kristallnacht (1938), 204 Kristan, Etbin, 175 KRN (The National Council), 231 Kruk, Herman, 125 Krzywicka, Irena, 71, 72 Kujbyszew, 180 Kulbak, Moyshe, 121 Kulczycki, Ludwik, 71 Kultur lige, 60, 105, 115, 121, 123–7, 129n23 Kurierek Robotniczy, 9 Kursky, Franz (Shmuel Kohn), 208–9, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251 Kushinski, Yisroel, 93 Kymlicka, Will, 258–62, 263, 266, 268 labor Zionism, 83, 135, 187, 198, 218–19 Labour Party (of Great Britain), 179, 185–6 Labour Party (of Israel), 181 Latvian Bund, 52 Lebnsfragn, 118 Leipzig, 49, 50 Lekert, Hirsh, 140 Lemberg, 135, 136, 140, 143, 175, 176, 199 Lenin, Vladimir, xi–xii, xvi, 14–15, 51, 81, 156, 246, 248, 255–8, 263, 270n32

Index Lenin Institute, 247–8 Leshtshinski, Yoysef, 205 Leyb, Moyshe, 93 Liber, Mark (Mikhail Isaakovich Goldman), xii, 29, 40, 48, 70 liberalism, and national cultural autonomy, 258–62, 263, 268 Liberman, Aron, 9 Lifshits-Frumkin, Ester, 113–14, 143, 146 Likhtenshtayn, Yisroel, 98, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107 Lipshits, Ester, 93 Lipshits, Khana, 93 literacy campaigns, 16 Literarish bleter, 125 Literarishe tribune, 125 Lithuanian Jews, 8, 29, 30, 32, 42, 157 Lithuanian socialists, 36, 198 Litvak, A. (Khayim Yankef Helfand), 152n50 Lodz, 3 Bund, xiii, 7–10, 77, 90–111, 135, 162 Jews in, 3–7, 28 Morgnshtern, 6 pogrom (1892), 6, 92 post-Holocaust Bund, 220 Lodzer veker, 104, 105 London, 233 Bund, 8, 50–1 Foreign Committee, 245 Hebrew Socialist Union, 9–10 German social democrats and Polish Bundists in exile, 179–82 LSI (Labour and Socialist International), 52, 73, 83–4, 163, 183–94 Lublin, 160, 209 guilds and beginnings of Bund, 4, 10, 10n5 post-Holocaust Bund, 215–16. 219 Zionists, 228, 230 Lublin Jewish Committee, 216 Luxemburg, Rosa, xvi, 136 Maccabi, 62, 63

277

Manger, Itzik, 125 Margolis, Aleksander, 105, 106, 107 Martov, Julius (Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum), 75 Marx, Karl, 9, 177 Marxism, xi, 167 Jewish didactic concepts used in press, 16–25 and national cultural autonomy, 198, 262, 268 May Day demonstrations and celebrations 1935, 76 1939, 166 1945, 220 Galicia, 139–40 Lodz, 6, 92, 95, 96, 97, 108 Vilna, 155 Warsaw, 164, 166 Mayzel, Eliahu Khayim, 9 Mayzil, Nakhman, 123, 124, 125 Mazo, Dovid, 98 Medem, Vladimir, xii, 38, 40, 41, 46, 48, 49, 50, 70, 74, 118, 137, 185, 199, 205, 249, 256–7 Medem Sanatorium, xii, 60, 72 Melamed, Zelig, 123, 125 Mendel, Hersh, 51 Mendelson, Shloyme, 72, 77 Mendelson, Stanislaw, 29 ´ Mensheviks, xvii, 48, 52, 53, 86, 156, 160, 248 Miedzeszyn, 72 Miedziogorski, Avrom, 93 Mikhalevitsh, Beynish (Yoysef Izbitski), 115, 120, 201 Mill, John (Yoysef Shloyme Mil), 30, 32, 40, 48, 70, 71, 198, 209, 244, 246 Milman, Shmuel, 105, 107 minority cultures, and national cultural autonomy, 255–70 Minsk, 7, 14, 91, 112, 245 Mishkinsky, Moshe, 43n3 Mitshnik, Dovid, 50 Mittweida, 49 Mizrachi, 228 Moment, 129n34 Morgentaler, Yoysef, 105, 107

278

Index

Morgnroyt (Jewish Workers’ Educational Association), 146 Morgnshtern (journal), 119 Morgnshtern (sports organization), 59–68 Moscow, 192, 247–8, 252, 253–4 Mozler, Anzelm, 139 multiculturalism, 255, 268 liberal, of Will Kymlicka, 258–62, 263, 268 Munich, 49, 50 Museum of Revolution (Moscow), 253, 254 Mutnik, Avrom (Mutnikovitsh, Gleb), 74, 90 Naprzód, 139 Narodniki, 7 Nasha tribuna, 118 Nashe Slovo, 118 Nasz Przeglad, 121 Nasze hasla, 41, 118 ´ Nasze Wyzwolenie, 105 national cultural autonomy, xi, 38–40, 41, 42, 74, 87, 96, 113, 156, 157, 158, 160, 184, 197–8, 228, 255–70 Austrian SDAP, 174–5, 177 Palestinian, 263–6 PPS support, 166, 167 . Z PS, 138, 144, 145–7, 148, 176 see also national ideology National Democrats, 162, 165 national ideology, Bund, xv–xvi, xviii, xx, 48, 74, 183–4; 1897–1905: 28–45; 1933–47: 197–212 Bund–PPS relations, 156, 160–2 PPSD, 135–6 SDAP, 135–6, 174–5 see also national cultural autonomy National Party, 165 National Socialism, see Nazism National Workers’ Union, 98 Naye folkstsaytung, 72, 75, 78, 86, 119, 201, 204 Di naye shul, 129n23 Nazism, xiii, xix, 164, 182, 192, 201–6, 207

Bund Archives under, 248–9 Lodz Bund, 108–9 Die Neie Zeit (Di naye tsayt) (London), 50 Die Neue Zeit, 173 neutralism, Medem’s theory, 137, 199, 205, 256–7, 263 New York, 246 Bund, 181, 208, 209 Bund Archives, 243, 249, 252 . Z PS, 144 Niedzialkowski, Mieczyslaw, 163, 188 ´ ´ Nister, Der (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh), 123 NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), 79n23 Nomberg, H. D., 123 Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR), 162 Norwegian Workers’ Party, 187 Novogrudski, Emanuel (Nowogrudski), 82, 250 Nowogrodzki, Maius, 89n3 Nutkevitsh, Sergey, 105 Oberman, Jacob, 102 Oler, Leon, 87 Olgin, Moyshe (Moyshe Yoysef Novomiski), 49 Opatoshu, Yoysef, 121 Organization of Jewish Writers, Journalists and Artists, 216 Organizing Committee of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, 216 Orzech, Mauricy, 208 Otkliki Bunda, 51 OZON (Camp of National Unity), 164, 166 Pabianice, 93 Palestine, 76, 186, 187, 189–90, 205, 209, 222–3, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234–5, 236, 237 national cultural autonomy, 263–7 Palestinian Communist Party, 189 Papier, Moyshe, 142 Paris Bund, 51, 53 Bund Archives, 248–9, 251

Index Congress of the Socialist International, 91, 184 World Congress of Jewish Culture, 192 Party of Socialist Revolutionaries see PSR Pat, Yankef, 121, 124, 209–10 PCP (Palestinian Communist Party), 189 Peasant Party, 165, 166 Peretz, Yitzkhok Leybush, 123, 130n35, 146 Peretz literary association, 53 Pergament, Yerakhmiel, 105 Perl, Feliks, 35, 147 Perle, Yehoshua, 121, 125 Pernerstorfer, Engelbert, 177, 178n22 Peysakhzon, Yitzkhok Mordekhai, 7, 91 Peyzner, Shmuel, 93 Piatnitsky, Osip, 47, 50 Piekhman, Hershel, 93 Pil sudski, Józef, 29–30, 116, 135, 157, ´ 160, 162, 163, 164, 187, 200, 204 Pinski, Dovid, 49, 123 Piotrków, 220 Pizshits, Khayim, 248 PKWN (Polish Committee of National Liberation), 215, 216 Platten, Fritz, 247 PLP (Progressive List for Peace), 264–5 Poalei Zion (Austria) see Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party Poalei Zion in Austria Poalei Zion (Poland), 104, 106, 107, 114, 163, 164, 187, 188; see also Poalei Zion-Left, Poalei ZionRight Poalei Zion (Russian Empire) see ESDRP–PZ Poalei Zion-Left, 61, 115, 119, 126, 228, 232, 234, 239n13 Poalei Zion-Right, 116, 228, 239n13 Podbrzezie, 71 Poe, Edgar Allan, 123 pogroms, xi, 199 Homel, 156 Kielce, 230, 232 Kishinev, 49, 50, 95, 156

279

Kristallnacht (1938), 204 Lodz, 6, 92 Przytyk, 120, 165, 205 Poliak, Dovid, 105, 106 Polish Bolshevik-Leninists, 192 Polish Committee of National Liberation see PKWN Polish Communist Party see KPP Polish Communist Workers’ Party see KPRP Polish Jews, self-organization before 1900, 3–12 Polish question, influence on Bund’s national program (1897–1905), 28–45 Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Upper Silesia see PPSD Polish Socialist Party see PPS Polish Socialist Party-Former Revolutionary Fraction (PPSdFR), 163 Polish Socialist Party-Revolutionary Fraction see PPS-Revolutionary Fraction Polish United Workers’ Party see PZPR Polish Workers’ Party see PPR Portnoy, Noyakh (Yekutiel Portnoi), 70, 71–4, 77–8, 83, 206, 247 Poslednie izvestiia, 51, 94, 151n32 Poznanski, Khayim Leyb, 105, 106, 107 Poznanski, Yisroel, 6 PPR (Polish Workers’ Party), 208, 219, 221, 222, 223, 234, 236, 239n13, 241n39 PPS (Polish Socialist Party), xvii, xviii, 28–42 passim, 75, 135, 136, 137, 147, 148, 155–71, 175, 187, 188, 191, 197, 198, 199, 223 Bund Archives, 246, 251 Congresses: Fourth (1897), 30–1, 32, 158; Seventh (1905), 38; Ninth (1906), 158; 23rd (1933), 164; 24th (1937), 165, 166 Jewish section, 42, 44n25, 251 Lithuanian section, 42 Lodz, 7, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 108

280

Index

‘the Young’ faction, 38 PPS-Left, xvii, 71, 100, 101, 102, 103, 137, 159 PPS-Proletariat, 36 PPS-Revolutionary Fraction, 147, 158–9 PPSD (Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Upper Silesia), 133, 134–8, 139, 140, 141, 144, 147–8, 149, 153–4n81, 175, 176, 197 Congresses: Eighth (1903), 134; Ninth (1904), 135–6; Tenth (1906), 140; Thirteenth (1913), 144 Jewish Section, 140, 143, 144, 146, 148, 152nn56, 61 PPSdFR (Polish Socialist Party-Former Revolutionary Fraction), 163 Pratt, Norma Fain, 250 Pravda, 16, 24 Presman, Shiya, 102 press see publishing Progressive List for Peace see PLP proletarian dictatorship, 192 disputes over meaning, 85–6 Przeds´wit (London), 33 Przemys´l, 140, 221 Przyszl os´´c, 94 ´ Przytyk pogrom, 120, 165, 205 PSR (Party of Socialist Revolutionaries), 52, 71, 184, 185, 251 publishing, xiii, 8, 13–27, 72 and cultural life, 117–26 Galicia, 139, 141–2, 144–5 Lodz, 94, 98 PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party, later known as Polish Workers’ Party), 167 Rabkin, Iser, 245 Radek, Karl (Karol Sobelsohn), 136, 137 Rafalovitsh, Khayim (Meyer Vaser), 123, 163 Ravitch, Melekh (Zekharye Bergner), 121, 124 Reiss, A., 152n61 religion, Bund and, 8–9, 74, 167, 236

Remarque, Erich Maria, 121 Renner, Karl, 138, 148 resistance movement, xiii, xix Revisionists, 228 Reyzen, Avrom, 123 Riba, Hinda (Ryba), 249 Robotnik, 191 Rocker, Rudolf, 50 Rosdolsky, Roman, 177 Rosen, Khayim, 93 Rosenberg, Shimon, 232, 233–4 Rote Falken (Austria), 65 Roth, Joseph, 174 Rovne, 228 Rozental, Ana Heler, 70, 73 Rozental, Pavel (Pinkhes), 70 RSDRP (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party), xi, xvi, xvii, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 46, 47, 51, 73, 74, 113, 138, 153n80, 197, 198, 247, 251 Foreign Delegation, 52, 53 Second Congress (1903), 49, 51, 156, 184 Unity Congress (1906), 100 RTsKhIDNI (Russian Center for Preservation and Study of the Documents of Contemporary History), 253 Rubinshtayn, Litman, 93 Ruch, 137 Russian Center for Preservation and Study of the Documents of Contemporary History, 253 Russian Revolution (1905–7), xi, xix, 20, 38–42, 69, 138 Lodz, 96–101 PPS–Bundist relations, 158 Russian Revolution (1917), xii, xvii, 15, 20, 47, 51, 52, 69, 73, 81, 160, 198, 246 Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party see RSDRP Russification, 31, 42, 157 Ruthenian Social Democrats (AustroHungarian Empire), 176 SA (Storm Division), 248, 249 St Petersburg, 159

Index SAPD (Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany), 192 Scherer, Emanuel (Szerer, Sherer), 181–2, 223 Schumacher, Kurt, 182 Schutzbund, 63 SDAP (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria), 63–4, 133, 134, 135–6, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 172–5, 177, 190 SDF (Social Democratic Federation of the United Kingdom), 50 SDKPiL (Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania), xvi, xvii, 35, 71, 136, 137, 148, 158, 159, 197 Lodz, 94, 95–6, 97, 99–101, 102, 103 Second International see Socialist International Segal, Sheyne Reyzl, 91 Segalovitsh, Zusman, 123 Seimists see SERP SERP (Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party), 48, 185, 251 Shefner, Borekh, 119, 126 Shklov, 7 Shluker, Yisroel, 93 Shmoysh, Avrom, 102 Shnior, Zalman, 123 Sholonim, Leyb, 8 Shomer (Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitsh), 112 Shrayber, Henryk, 144 Shtern, Yisroel, 112, 124 Shtrahl, 144 Shul bibliotek, 129n23 Shul fraynd, 129n23 Shul un lebn, 115, 129n23 Shul vegn, 129n23 Shuldenfray, Mikhl (Michal ´ Szuldenfrei), 216, 219, 229, 231, 242n53 Shvartsman, Dovid, 102, 103 Sinclair, Upton, 121 SKIF (Socialist Children’s Union), 60, 65, 105, 121 Slovenes, and national autonomy, 175

281

Smooha, Sammy, 265, 266, 267 Sobelsohn, Karol see Radek, Karl social activities, post-Holocaust, 217–19, 221–2 Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania see SDKPiL Social Democratic Bund, xii, 52, 246 Foreign Delegation, 52 Social Democratic Federation of the United Kingdom, 50 Social Democratic Party of Bukovina, 144 Social Democratic Party of Germany see SPD Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Austria) see SDAP Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Russia) see RSDRP Social Revolutionaries see PSR Socialist Children’s Union see SKIF Socialist International (also Second International), 18, 49, 73, 245, 246, 251 Congresses: Brussels (1891), 157, 158; Paris (1900), 91, 184; Amsterdam (1904), 184; Stuttgart (1907), 185 after World War I, 83–4, 160, 186 after World War II, 181–2 see also LSI Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany see SAPD Socialist Writers’ Union see SOSHAYF Socialist Zionists see SS Soloweitschik, L., 11n11 Sommerstein, Emil, 216, 231 SOSHAYF (Socialist Writers’ Union), 125 Der sotsial-demokrat, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Sotsialistishe bleter, 85 South Africa, 49 Soviet Union attitude of Bund to, 86–8, 186–7, 191–2, 220 return of Jews from, 227–8, 231 Spanish Civil War, 88, 205 SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), 48, 81, 173

282

Index

memories of members in exile in London in World War II, 179–82, 248, 251 sports organizations, xii, 59–68, 201 Lodz, 105 SS (Zionist-Socialist Workers’ Party), 48, 99, 185, 200, 246, 251, 263 Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), 180 Stalinist regime, xiii, 70, 88, 180, 192 State Archives of the Russian Federation see GARF Stone, G., 16 student element, 46–53 passim, 93, 98 Stuttgart, 185 Sweden, 233 S´wider, 234 Swiss Social Democratic Party, 246, 247 Switzerland Bund groups, 50 see also Geneva Szczecin, 239n16 Szerer, Emanuel see Scherer, Emanuel Szuldenfrei, Michal see Shuldenfray, ´ Mikhl Tarlo, Dovid, 93 Tarnów, 140, 164, 188, 220 Temporary Central Committee of Polish Jews, 216 theater, 126–7 Tobias, Henry, 47, 70, 71, 243 Tolstoy, Leo, 121 TOZ (Society for the Protection of Health), 60 trade unions, xii, 77, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 201, 205 Archives, 251, 252 Galicia, 133, 137, 139–40, 145, 147, 148 Lodz, 98–9, 101–2, 104 London, 9 see also American Federation of Labor (AFL), CGT Traverso, Enzo, 183 Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronshtein), 49, 192, 246

Di tsayt, 118 Tsaytlin, Arn, 125 TsGAOR (Central Archives of the October Revolution), 253 Tshemeriski, Sasha (Aleksandr), 101 Tsukunft, 60, 65, 73, 104, 105, 121, 126, 228 Tsvey bay tog, 122 Di tsveyer (the ‘twos’), 73, 82–8 TSYSHO (Central Jewish School Organization), 60, 87, 115, 116–17, 120, 123, 126 Tverska, Rebeka, 8 Ukraine, 198 Bund, 156, 253 Jews on, 186–7 Ukrainian Social Democrats (AustroHungarian Empire), 176 Ukrainian Social Democrats (Poland), 162 Undzere kinder (Our children), 114, 116 Union of the Jewish Partisans, 239n13 Union of Polish Patriots, 216 Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, 47 United Alliance of the Socialist Left, 106 United Committee of the Red Cross (Lodz), 95 United Nations (UN), 235, 237 United Organization of Workers’ Associations and Support Groups to the Bund Abroad, 47, 48, 49, 52 United States, 49, 158, 268 Bund and American labor movement, 244, 250 see also New York Unzer ekspres, 129n34 Unzer folkstsaytung, 119 Unzer tsayt (NY), 181 Unzer tsayt (St Petersburg), 118 Unzer tsayt (Warsaw), 74 Vander, 148 Vandervelde, Emile, 187, 188

Index Vaser, Meyer see Rafalovitsh, Khayim Vaykhert, Mikhael, 126, 127 Vaynshtayn, Aron Rakhmiel see Weinstein, Aaron Rakhmiel Vaysenblum, Shamay, 91, 98, 99 Der veker, 118 Vestnik Bunda, 51, 256 Vienna, 52, 64, 65, 118, 143, 144, 172, 174, 175 Vienna Union see International Working Union of Socialist Parties Vilna and beginning of Bund in Lodz, 7 Bund, xiii, 70, 73, 74, 157, 161, 245 Bundist intellectuals, 13 cultural activities, 112, 117, 118, 122 ‘Polish question’, 28, 29 post-Holocaust Zionism, 228 socialism, 155 Vilna Social Democratic Group, 90 Vilna Tactic, 15 Vilna Teachers’ Institute, 13 Vinograd, Berek, 93 Vint, 142 Virovski, Benyomin, 105 Vitebsk, 7, 245 Vladeck, Baruch Charnay, 246 Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur, 124–5, 129n32 Vorwärts, 48 Vörwärts Building, 248–9 Warsaw, 3 Bund, xiii, 39, 41, 71–2, 75, 77, 135, 137, 157, 164, 166, 220, 252 culture and education, 113, 114–15, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127 ghetto, 180, 206–8, 242n51 and Jewish self-organization before, 1900, 7 and Polish question, 28, 30, 39, 40, 41–2 post-Holocaust, 230 sports/culture, 60, 61–2, 64

283

Warsaw Committee of Bund Organizations in Poland, 159 Weinstein, Aaron Rakhmiel (Aron Rakhmiel Vaynshtayn), 70, 247 Wilde, Oscar, 123 Wistrich, Robert, 43n3 WJC (World Jewish Congress), 236, 241n40 women, in the Bund, 8, 76–7 Morgnshtern, 62 . Z PS, 145 women’s organizations, xii, 60, 201 Workers’ Circle (Arbeter Ring), London, 51 Paris, 51, 53 Workers’ Olympics, 64 World Conference of Bundist Organizations (1947), 210 World Congress of Jewish Culture (Paris), 192 World Coordinating Committee of Bundist Organizations, 209, 210, 249 World Jewish Congress see WJC World War I, 52, 114, 159, 198 and Bund Archives, 246 Lodz, 103 World War II, xiii, xviii, 88, 167 annihilation of European Jewry, 65 memories of German social democrats and Polish Bundists in London, 179–82 see also Nazism; resistance movement YAF (Jewish Worker-Women), 60, 105 Yashunski, Gershon (Gerszon Jasu´nski), 216, 219 Yasni, A. Volf (A. Wolf Jasny), 6 Yiddish language and culture, Bund and, xii, xiii, xviii, 13, 29–30, 87, 146, 156, 198 Bund’s contribution between world wars, 112–30 influence on Marxist press, 16–25 Medem’s theory of neutralism, 257 post-Holocaust, 233

284

Index

PPSD and, 134 SDAP, 177 . Z PS, 145, 146, 148, 176 Der yidisher arbeyter (Bund), 16, 18, 32, 33, 51, 117, 244–5 YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute, later YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), 123, 243 young people, in the Bund, 8, 93 post-Holocaust tension between Bund and Zionists, 229, 233–4, 237 . Z PS 145 youth organizations, xii, 59, 60, 72, 114, 201 Archives, 252 Lodz, 104, 105 youth publications, 120–1 Yudin, Vitali (Isai Aizenshtat), 52 Der yudisher arbeyter (Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party Poalei Zion in Austria), 135 Der yudisher sotsial-demokrat, 139, 141, 142 Yugnt-veker, 61, 129n31 Yung teater, 125, 127 Zakhariash, Shimon (Szymon Zachariasz), 223, 234, 237 Zaks, Feliks (Sachs), 42, 44n25 Zeliger, Moyshe, 102 Zelmanovitsh, Efrayim Luzer, 105 Zelmanowicz, Motl (Zelmanovitsh), 89n16 Zgierz, 93

zhargonishe komitetn, 112, 122 Zhitlovsky, Chaim (Khayim), 184 Zilberfarb, Moyshe, 124 Zilbershtayn, Menakhem, 105 Zimmerwald conference (1916), 81 Zionism, xiii, 10, 127 Bund and, xi, xv–xvi, xix, 33, 48, 74, 76, 116, 120, 183, 185–92, 198, 200, 205, 208, 209 Bund and post-Holocaust, 213–42 Lodz, 96, 106 and national cultural autonomy, 267 SDAP, 177 . Z PS, 133, 141, 146 Zionist Democrats, 239n13 Zionist-Socialist Workers’ Party (SS) see SS Zjednoczenie, 136 . Z PS (Jewish Social Democratic Party in Galicia), 133–54, 175–6 Congresses: Founding (1905), 138, 139, 140–1, 146; Second (1906), 143, 145, 148, 175–6; Third (1908), 143; Fourth (1910), 143; Fifth (1911), 144, 146; Sixth (1913), 144, 146, 148; Seventh (1920), 145 Zubatov, Sergei Vasilevich, 7 Zubatovshchina, 251 Zuckerman, Yitzchak, 229, 230, 233, 240n20 Zurich, 38, 182, 188 Zygielbaum, Shmuel (Zygelboym), 179–28, 208